Liz laughed and said, “Now you’re bragging. It’s a delicious ship.”
Her assumed familiarity with sea matters irritated McNair and he turned away from her to observe, “But you’re right, John. For returning to Guadalcanal a Goal Poster has a certain aptness. After all, when you Johnnies first went up there you hadn’t much better.”
Then the two men entered into one of those reflective communions which so infuriated Liz Millstor. Once at dinner in Sydney her husband had broken such a dedicated silence by blurting out, “By God, McNair, we did make do with damned little.”
The big Australian had banged his leg and cried, “But we had Clarence Miller, and he was worth more than a battleship.”
John knew that Liz detested such conversations. She had explained why once in Boston. “They’re slightly obscene. Like a woman who’s suffered an awkward childbirth. She insists upon flaunting her unusual pain between the meat course and the salad. All right! She had the baby and now she’s out dancing. You men went off to war. Now you’re back home. Let’s let it go at that.”
But John Millstor could not do so. For him war had been an awakening of the spirit. Through it he had discovered what always before had eluded him: meaning. In fact, although he would not openly admit it, war had touched his emotions more profoundly than Liz had ever been able to—except for the first febrile weeks of marriage.
He didn’t blame Liz. He had married her in 1937 when he knew practically nothing about other people or himself, and up till 1941 he guessed that he was enjoying a standard American kind of happiness. Then, on December 8th near Boston Common, he had come upon a group of hell-raising young fellows enlisting in the Navy, and something about their tough indifference made him realize that they still possessed many things he had somehow lost.
Impetuously, in a manner quite unprecedented for the Millstors of Boston, he had enlisted, and now as he recalled that quixotic gesture he had to acknowledge that he had enlisted just as much against Liz as against Tojo. He had derived a childish pleasure from announcing it to her. She had reached for a handkerchief and sniffed. “You enlisted!” she gasped. “Oh, John! Couldn’t you have got a commission? Think of the children.”
“We have enough money, Liz …”
“But, John! It’s not the money. It’s that you’re … Well, you’re a college graduate. You’re a responsible man in Boston.” Then she had broken down and kissed him heartily. “And you’re a gallant fool,” she had sobbed.
Later, of course, she learned that many Harvard men had chosen to enlist. “Fashionable nonsense,” she explained to her friends. Her pain was further assuaged when John rapidly became an officer “in something terribly important, you know.” She rather guessed, and intimated as much to her circle, that it involved counter-intelligence.
“But Benny told you!” John had protested. “I’m in small boats!”
“Benny never told me,” Liz insisted, but even if Benny had she would have elected not to believe that her husband was piddling around in landing craft. “Still,” she wept on his last leave, “I guess you Millstors have been going off to wars for five generations.” She had smiled bravely but had finally clung to him crying, “Oh, John! Do you think little Derek will be chasing off some day?”
“More’n likely,” he had replied.
“Oh, damn!” she had groaned. “Now look, John Millstor! Don’t you go being a hero! I want you back!”
The silence at the rail of the Roviana was broken by a rough little voice calling, “Cap’m, Cap’m?”
“It’s Nella,” McNair grunted with no enthusiasm.
For some days the Millstors had tried to comprehend Mrs. McNair and had failed. They could not understand why Alec had married her nor what now held them together. When she appeared on deck they understood even less.
She was a dumpy, oddly complexioned woman whom Liz had characterized as “the American farm wife sixty years ago.” Certainly her habit of Jumping whenever her husband spoke, her invariable reference to him as Cap’m stamped her as one of those nineteenth-century slaveys Liz had always despised. “Can you imagine!” she had laughed one night after a dinner with the McNairs. “A subjugation like that? Premature aging? Standing still while your husband forges ahead? Tied down by men’s silly rules? Oh, John! I’d never make a good Australian wife. Please promise to take me back home.”
“Evening,” Mrs. McNair said in what was for her a sprightly voice. “Thought I’d miss the ship.”
“I thought so too,” McNair said gruffly.
“I’m only going as far as Guadalcanal,” Mrs. McNair explained. Her husband turned his back on her and went to the bridge, whereupon the Roviana began slowly to stand out into mid-channel. For a moment there was that glorious clanging of bells that presages the good voyage, the protesting groan of the propeller, and the lights on shore shifting their positions for a last look at the voyagers.
Caught up in the strange beauty of a tramp steamer’s leaving port, Millstor slipped his arm about his beautiful wife and exclaimed like a schoolboy viewing his first sunset on Boston wharves, “There’s something wonderful about a boat setting out for the South Seas.”
Liz pulled his excited lips against her cheek. “I’m so glad we came, John,” she whispered. “It’s so very good to see you breathless and relaxed all at the same time. I’m sorry if I didn’t understand—back there in Boston. I do now.”
This unexpected depth of emotion quite upset Millstor and he was about to acknowledge his appreciation of her sportsmanship when the spell—brief though it had been—was completely smashed, for his wife held his face against hers and whispered, “We shall have a perfectly wonderful trip, shan’t we? Even with that awful woman aboard?”
“I’ll go in and shave,” Millstor said.
“There’s no hurry,” Liz teased.
“McNair said they ate promptly.”
“I’ll be there,” she laughed brightly. “You scrape the barbed wire off.”
“What I meant was,” John called back, “let’s get off on the right foot. Long voyage and all that.”
Liz poked her head into the cabin and chortled, “Don’t worry, fuss budget. I shan’t wreck your military love affair with Cap’m.” She gouged him in the ribs with a long forefinger. “Because I love you very much.”
But even so, trouble started that night. Mrs. McNair stopped by and called in a husky voice, “You two! Better get a shuffle on. Cap’m likes to eat prompt.” There was a sound of awkward feet and then silence.
Liz winced. “Seems we’ll have a pretty rigid regime. Everything according to a timetable.”
“Darling,” her husband laughed, “if the British like to be stuffy … After all, they were wonderful allies.”
“Sweetheart!” she interrupted, kissing him so that he fell backwards against the bed. “You’re so generous in your excuses for other people. You’re a dear, wonderful man and I’m going to be late for dinner.”
“You wouldn’t be, if you’d hurry,” he half announced, half asked.
“All right!” she agreed. “Watch me hurry.” But he noticed that she dragged even more than usual. When they reached the wardroom the McNairs and Mr. Morrison, the engineer, were already eating.
“Dinner’s at six,” McNair said gruffly, not rising to greet his guests. “Food’s apt to be pretty good, so we humor the cook.” He added this with a disarming grin, as if to take away the sting of his first remark.
Liz smiled generously and helped herself to the soup. “John was angry with me for being so slow,” she confessed. “Especially after your wife was good enough to remind us.” She beamed at the Australian woman, who did not smile back.
When dinner was over Captain McNair combed out his beard, leaned way back in his chair, and indicated that the steward could pass the cigars. At this signal Mrs. McNair rose quietly and started for her quarters, “so that the men might be alone with their cigars and port.” She held out a hand to Liz and said, “Come! We’ll tend to our kn
itting.”
She could have found no more insulting phrase. Liz looked up with a face all innocence and said, “Thanks, I’ll stay. I rather like cigar smoke.”
There was a moment of audible tension during which Mrs. McNair blushed and looked to her husband for instructions which were delivered by a disgusted shake of his head. The little Australian woman left and closed the door.
The talk which followed was most uneasy. Mr. Morrison, always a taciturn man who smoked a pipe and grunted answers, ignored the amusing questions Liz asked about the ship. There was some talk of Guadalcanal, during which it was painfully apparent that Captain McNair wished his cabin cleared of women. This irritated Liz, so by artful flattery she finally thawed the bearded man into explaining how watches were changed aboard the Roviana. There was, however, no easy flow of conversation such as one imagines aboard a small ship plowing northward to the tropics.
After twenty such awkward minutes Captain McNair dispatched the steward to inform his wife that “the gentlemen had finished their cigars and awaited the ladies,” whereupon Mrs. McNair appeared with the improbable news of a whale to starboard. Now there was light-hearted discussion of whales in Southern waters and Captain McNair grew eloquent as he told of the barque Essex which was completely stove in and sunk by a whale in 1819. “The beast attacked twice, altering course so as to intercept the ship head on.” Mr. Morrison said he had seen a whale leap into the air and fall upon another whale, but he narrated the incident with such pointless hesitancy that no one could find further observation on the phenomenon. This did not annoy the engineer, who rose and went to a cupboard. Mrs. McNair clapped her hands and cried, “Good-oh, the squeeze box!”
Mr. Morrison took down an octagonal accordion, which he pulled out to its entire length in one mournful wail. He tested it for tone and then put it aside while he relit his pipe. Leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, his countenance most doleful, he started a series of rollicking tunes. During the strathspeys and reels of his native Scotland he kept his right foot pumping madly, never changing the droop of his mouth.
Captain McNair marked time with his cigar and said expansively, “It’s rare music for a ship, that.” And for a moment John Millstor sensed the true camaraderie of a small ship at night. The last brandy was served and in the distance the lights of Australia sank beneath the western waves.
As the party broke up McNair artfully detained Millstor and said, “Your wife doesn’t understand, John. Aboard a British ship it’s customary for the women to retire …”
“I know,” Millstor blushed. “In my family we used to do the same … But in recent years … things have changed.”
“It’s still a good custom,” the Australian said, leaving abruptly for the bridge.
John recognized this as a rebuke, one which he was obligated to pass on to his wife lest there be an unpleasant scene later on. He moved along the deck to their cabin but when he reached the door he heard Liz singing some of the sea chanteys Mr. Morrison had played, his resolution left him and he stood beside the rail. How could he lecture his wife about social customs? The thought repelled him. In fact, long ago he had surrendered his rights to lecture her about anything. He tried to recall how he had been tricked into giving up his prerogatives, those rights which big Alec McNair had so obviously kept.
It had begun, John thought, on their honeymoon. They arrived at the family island off the coast of Maine, where Millstors had been taking their brides for generations, and suddenly Liz had clutched his arm with overwhelming tenderness and cried, “We shall have a wonderful marriage, shan’t we, John?” That was her first use of the rhetorical question, and as its bittersweet memory returned, here at the fringe of the Coral Sea, John cringed.
They had spent their wedding night discussing the attributes of a perfect marriage, and as John thought back to the vital decisions of that first skirmish he realized that right there he had begun his long retreat. Liz had said, “The most important thing in marriage is to have a true understanding. Even on the most trivial points.” John was to discover that this meant he must talk everything over with his wife, who would then determine what should be done. He had grown to depend upon her judgment above his own, for by and large the Millstor men had never been brilliant.
Even now he could remember how frightened he had been when Liz had said, during their first year, “John! I’m worried.”
“What about, darling?” he had gulped, for she had been pregnant at the time. “Is anything …”
“I don’t mean about Hector,” she laughed, patting her stomach. “I mean about us.”
“Us?” he had repeated incredulously.
“Yes, John,” she said tragically. “I am a good wife, aren’t I?”
That was how it started. That was the gambit which had proved most efficient in eroding the spirit of a man. He pondered the dark waters at the stern of the Roviana and mused, “How did that go? She was worried about whether or not she was a good wife. I told her she was, but she listed a dozen things about herself that she didn’t like. But the upshot of it all was that I quit smoking cigars. Let’s see, how did it work out that way?”
In time he had become alert to his wife’s military tactics. When she said, “We shall have a wonderful trip, shan’t we?” it signified that she had certain specific ideas of what should be done and that the least expected of her husband was blind obedience to her strategy. If she confessed, “John, I’m worried. About us!” it presaged a manly, heart-to-heart talk, the first half hour of which consisted of a recital of her defects followed by three cruelly efficient minutes during which he agreed to give up something which offended her. The poker games, the class reunions, the fishing trip to Androscoggin, the old felt hats, the dinners with Ponsonby … All the marks of John Millstor as a man had slowly been erased and in their place had been drawn, in fine woman’s script, the clean, handsome outlines of the world’s most pathetic modern miracle: the typical American husband.
Liz was not selfish. John had to admit that. Nor was she spendthrift. She paid far less for clothes than most women and appeared twice as attractive: “I think it’s a wife’s duty to see to it that her husband dresses better than she does.” With this in mind she pleaded, “John, we’re making fifteen thousand a year now. Isn’t it about time for us to buy your suits from J. Press?” He had protested that J. Press was the tailor for Harvard men who weren’t quite sure of themselves but who had to make a reputation on Wall Street. “I like the suits at Filene’s,” he had insisted. But in the end he had gone to be fitted at J. Press’s and had come away looking very repectable in conservative high lapels and expensive English suitings. Liz was delighted when her Boston friends said, “Really, John is getting to look too distinguished.”
Shortly after she had rebuilt his wardrobe, he had enlisted in the Navy, and there came the humiliating day when he appeared in gob’s uniform with the schoolboy’s challenge, “Now, let’s see what J. Press can do to these!” Liz had cried and cried, “You look so damned ordinary. And so brave.” But when he became an officer she ordered a complete outfit from J. Press and did not comment when he ripped out the labels and scuffed up the coat. “He’s still a darned convincing-looking officer,” she said approvingly.
Now he stood at the railing and reviewed these sorties. He had come out of them changed, no longer a callow youngster. He was a successful lawyer, the husband of a desirable wife, the head of a family and a pillar in Boston society. He was all these things, and he knew it. But he also knew what he was not. He was no longer a man.
He proved this anew by shrugging his shoulders and going to the cabin where Liz sat brushing her hair. “A hundred strokes each night, and you’ll never lose your husband,” she always said.
“Liz,” he began hesitatingly.
“Yes, darling?” she said brightly.
“You agreed that we’d always discuss things? Everything?”
“Why, of course, darling! Here, sit down.” She moved over, but he sat on
his own bed. “Not way over there!” she begged. “Whenever there’s something unpleasant, we should face it together.” She had always made a great point of “talking things out,” “sharing one another’s troubles,” and “making adversity bring us closer together.”
“It’s not unpleasant,” he laughed. “It’s only that Captain McNair says there’s a custom aboard British ships …”
“Oh, John!” she laughed. “You mean about the wardroom and all that?”
“Please, Liz. He takes it seriously.”
“And he asked you to give me a lecture!” She laughed delightedly and kicked her bare foot into the air.
“He simply asked me to explain,” John insisted.
“Oh, now!” she teased, catching him by the arm and pulling his face closer to hers. “We aren’t going to let an old-fashioned Australian tyrant ruin our vacation, are we?”
For a moment Millstor was disposed to fight this thing out, but he was completely thrown off guard by his wife’s next question: “Surely we don’t want a marriage like the McNairs’, do we? A browbeaten woman, a relic of feudal times? Oh, no!”
She dismissed the protest and at dinner next night affected not to notice when Mrs. McNair left dutifully before the cigars. The captain said nothing, but Liz noticed that in his indignation he crumbled the end of his cigar and had to ask for another.
Late that night a knock came at the Millstor door and Mrs. McNair said, “Could I see you for a moment, please?” John rose and the little Australian woman said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I meant the Missus.” He could hear Liz wince at such an appellation, but he also heard her say sweetly, “I’ll be right there, Mrs. McNair.”
The captain’s wife was brief. “Cap’m told me to tell you that please after dinner leave the wardroom for a few minutes. It’s the custom.”