A Commodore of Errors (21 page)

He placed the signed resignation letter on his desk and then rubbed his hands together. “Now, where were we, dear?”

Johnson reached over and pinched Miss Lambright.

She backed up and placed the love seat between them. “Actually, I'd prefer to go back to the Commodore. I never thought I'd say that but I do.”

“The Commodore? But he's a fruitcake.”

“At least he's got follow-through. That's what he says anyway.”

“But I've got follow-through, too! You never gave me a chance, taking off my clothes like that, jumping in my lap. What man could respond to that kind of pressure? That's the problem with women today, they're too aggressive. But I thought you were different. You looked like a nice librarian. You looked like a woman a man could pursue.”

“I don't want to be pursued.”

“You don't?”

“No. A real woman wants to get down to business. Maybe a drink or two first, but that's it.”

“Oh. Will scotch do?”

“Scotch will do fine, my little hunter.” Miss Lambright undid a strand of her hair.

Johnson poured a tumbler full of Dewars for Miss Lambright. When she finished it, he poured another, and then another, matching her drink for drink. He needed to loosen up. Besides, his first chance with Miss Lambright had been too easy. There was no chase, no thrill of the hunt. Johnson liked to be the aggressor—it kept his skills sharp. When a woman made the first move, he got nervous and then he had . . . trouble. That's why he liked younger women—they were meek in his presence. He watched Miss Lambright undo another strand of her hair. Johnson had to strike before she made the first move again. He tickled her ribs.

“No! I'm ticklish.”

Johnson moved in for the kill. He chased her around the pink velour love seat. When he caught her, he tickled her some more.

Miss Lambright sprang loose and ran around the red leather couch and then the rickety director's chairs. They played cat and mouse with his big desk, then again around the leather couch until Miss Lambright surrendered. Johnson undid the top button of her blouse. Miss Lambright pretended to put up a fight.

“No, stop.”

“You do know I'm the biggest, don't you?”

“So I've heard.”

Miss Lambright's tanned skin glowed in the afternoon sunlight streaming through Johnson's office window. Her breasts, supported by her wonder bra, were gorgeous, the color of all that Dewar's scotch they just drank. Miss Lam-bright undid her bra.

“No,” Johnson said. He liked them better pushed up. He put his arms around Miss Lambright and fumbled with the hasp on the back of Miss Lambright's brassiere. He never did get the hang of undoing a woman's bra, not even after all these years, and now he had to figure out how to put the damn thing back on. Miss Lambright fought to take the bra off while Johnson struggled to clip it back together.

“Hey,” Miss Lambright said, “what are you doing?”

“Just give me a sec,” Johnson said.

He turned Miss Lambright around and peered at the lock and hasp mechanism. It looked easy enough, but his big hands just could not grab the little hasp.

“Hey, it's already off, what are you doing back there?”

Miss Lambright jerked away, causing one of her breasts to fall out of its cup. Johnson scooped it up and tried to stuff it back in place, but the bra strap slipped off Miss Lambright's shoulder, so Johnson grabbed the cup with his other hand, slapped it on Miss Lambright's breast, and held it in place while he tried to get her arm through the strap.

“Hey! Are you trying to take this thing off or put it back on?”

Johnson pushed Miss Lambright's arm through the strap, and instead of dealing with the lock and hasp, he simply tied the two straps in a square knot. This pushed her breasts up even more, which Johnson liked. But in the fight to put her bra back on, Johnson had undone Miss Lambright's tight hair bun.

“Oh no,” Johnson said.

Putting Miss Lambright's hair back into a bun proved even more arduous than putting her breasts back into her bra. Miss Lambright's tight little bun was now a beehive.

Johnson grabbed Miss Lambright by the shoulders and held her out at arm's length to have a good look at her. She was all out of focus. He pushed her from side to side to change the way the light fell on her and peered at her with one eye closed.

Miss Lambright allowed herself to be pushed around like a rag doll.

“You like what you see, big boy?” The word “see” came out all slurry and her knees nearly gave way when she said it.

“You'd better come with me, Miss Lambright. I think you've been over-served.”

Johnson ushered Miss Lambright into his office and slapped his hand on the secret book in the bookcase. The Murphy bed plopped out of the wall, Johnson plopped onto the bed, and Miss Lambright fell facedown into the silk sheets and curled herself into a ball by his side. Miss Lambright's beehive brushed up against Johnson's nose and made him sneeze one time before he fell asleep as well.

The two sleeping beauties did not notice the Commodore walk in a moment later. The Commodore had his camera with him and wasted no time snapping a few photos of Johnson and Miss Lambright with her messy hair in the Murphy bed. On his way out, the Commodore snatched Johnson's resignation letter off his desk and tucked it under his arm.

His POA was proceeding unimpeded.

SYLVIA'S MY NAME

M
rs. Tannenbaume got the stepladder out of the garage herself. She couldn't mwait a minute longer for Midshipman Jones to show up. Umbriago! The garage looked like Hogan's Alley. She'd been meaning to clean it out, she just hadn't gotten around to it what with everything else going on in her life at the moment.

“I'm crazy busy,” she told her friend Roz earlier over coffee. “Crazy busy.” First she's told that her son is going to be the next superintendent of the Merchant Marine Academy, and that they're going to make him an admiral, no less. Then she finds out from Florence, the gal who works in the home office of the shipping company that owned the
God is Able
, that her sonny boy just married a Thai bar girl.

Flo didn't use the word “bar girl,” but come on, love, who's kidding whom?
After sixty years on this earth, her sonny boy finally finds Miss Right and she's a nineteen-year-old Thai girl working in Singapore? Mrs. Tannenbaume told Roz
that she didn't just fall off the back of a turnip cart. “I've been around, lovey, and no one is going to tell me that a nineteen-year-old Thai girl working in Singapore is anything but a two-bit tramp.”

She was always afraid that her sonny boy would do this. She knew he carried on when he was at sea—she heard him talking on the phone with his other shipping buddies when he was home between voyages. The dispatcher at the Union Hall told her that seamen who stayed on the South American run for too long usually ended up having a girlfriend in every port. The love run, seamen called it. The love run didn't pay spit, but the women more than make up for the lousy pay. Captain Tannenbaume had stayed on the love run from New York to Rio for over twenty years. Her sonny boy was what was known as a “shore hound,” the union officials down at the hall told Mrs. Tannenbaume, and that's why he had no money.

If her sonny boy knew she had gone down to the Union Hall to see about him getting on higher-paying ships, he would have threw a fit. But what else could she do? She knew that officers in the merchant marine made good money and she just couldn't understand why her sonny boy sent home such meager allotment checks. He kept telling her that only the captain made any money and everybody else worked for slave wages. But when he finally became captain, he sent home even less. That's because as captain, he was able to spend even more time ashore, whereas as chief mate, he was practically glued to the deck when the ship was in port.

“He spends money like a drunken sailor, is all there is to it,” she told Roz. “Not that he's a drunk—he hardly ever touches the stuff—it's the carrying on when he's in port, the hoo hoo and the ha ha, that's where all the money goes.” Mrs. Tannenbaume knew it to be true—her sonny boy couldn't hide it from her. But it's not as if the apple fell far from the tree. One of Captain Tannenbaume's fathers was a sailor and look what he did? Carrying on in a South African port with a seventeen-year-old girl. Of course, he himself was only nineteen at the time. That was a little different than being sixty years old and carrying on with a nineteen-year-old bar girl.

Mrs. Tannenbaume lugged the stepladder out of the garage, through the kitchen, and into the hall. She opened the door to the upstairs, Captain
Tannenbaume's room when he was young, before she turned it into an upstairs apartment for Mr. Schwartz. She missed Mr. Schwartz. She always knew the angina would get him in the end. After he'd passed on during the excitement of a canasta game a couple of weeks ago, she took his stuff—clothes mostly, also a clock radio, his TV, his collection of handball gloves—down to the St. Aloysius. The kids had yard sales from time to time and they were always looking for stuff to sell.

Mrs. Tannenbaume dragged the stepladder up the stairs, bouncing its weight on every step. The house was dormerless, so the upstairs apartment had little headroom. It hadn't bothered Mr. Schwartz, who was short, but her sonny boy, who was tall, finally had to move out of the house when he was in his forties—he kept hitting his head on the slope of the ceiling. He told his mother that his stateroom aboard ship was bigger than the entire upstairs of her house. Plus, he had no place to store any of his stuff. The attic was the only storage space in the whole house and Mrs. Tannenbaume kept it padlocked. Whenever her sonny boy asked her what she kept in there, she said, “My past.”

When she became pregnant and told her father that the baby's father could have been any one of three boys—Eddie, Teddy, or Freddie—her father disowned her. Her mother told her it was best if she left home to have the baby. America, her mother had insisted. “Find the next ship going to America and get on it.” That was so long ago. Mrs. Tannenbaume set up the ladder below the door to the attic. She sat on the bottom rung and took a moment to catch her breath. She wasn't exactly a spring chicken any longer.
Where, oh where, did the years go?

She had not opened the padlock to the attic in . . . forever. When was the last time? Could it have been when she moved in fifty years ago? Was that possible? She still had the key. She kept it in the drawer in the side table next to her bed, and she'd had the same bed, the same side table, the same lamp for sixty years. When you grow up looking over your shoulder, you tend to want to hold on to things, things that are familiar. You want to keep what you have. Mrs. Tannenbaume's mother always told her that there was nothing more expensive than a cheap product, so Mrs. Tannenbaume bought good stuff and held on to it. Of course, her mother did not subscribe to the buy-and-hold philosophy when
Mrs. Tannenbaume was about to leave her home to have her baby. No, then her mother advised her to leave everything behind. Everything.

Including her faith.

“It's too hard being a Jew,” her mother told her. When Mrs. Tannenbaume's father took his family to Durban after kristallnacht, her mother wanted to live anonymously. “Why do we have to be Jewish here?” her mother asked. “Why can't we tell people that it's Tannenbaume with an E, that we're not Jewish, that we're German? We can join the Reformed Church and act like good Protestants. Our life will be easier, and we won't have to live in fear.” Mrs. Tannenbaume's father would not hear of it. They were Jews, he said. There's no running away from that. It's a fact, like being tall or short, it's how you are born. Mrs. Tannenbaume's mother had said, “Fine, you want to be a Jew? Be a Jew. But don't drag me into, I'm tired of being persecuted, tired of running away. I want to live in peace. I don't want to be a Jew anymore.”

It was her father who insisted that Mrs. Tannenbaume become a Bat Mitzvah. Oh, the fights her parents had over that. Her father shouted that his only child would become a daughter of the Commandment and no one would stand in his way. In the end, Mrs. Tannenbaume's mother didn't stand in the way, but she surely didn't help either. A Bat Mitzvah must read from the Torah, and Mrs. Tannenbaume's
haftarah
reading was from the book of the prophet Malachi and it was long. Too long. Her father was strict and he made her practice for long hours in preparation for her Bat Mitzvah ceremony. Mrs. Tannenbaume needed help learning Hebrew, but her father was too busy and her mother refused to speak it, so it was left to her father's assistant, who was also the local cantor. He chanted Hebrew along with Mrs. Tannenbaume in the shop. The cantor played the guitar, and when he and Mrs. Tannenbaume were finished practicing, he would sing fun songs, shanties that he learned from the seafarers who came into the shop looking for uniforms and work clothes. They were the same songs her father remembered from the docks of Bremerhaven. He would have preferred that the cantor get back to work, but since it reminded him of home, he let the cantor play on.