Sentinels of Fire (36 page)

“From the other side of the world,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Yes, that must be so,” she said. “Dutch could never tell me where he was at any given time; the censors, you know.” She showed me into the living room, where we took seats. A Negro maid appeared with a tray service of what looked like iced tea and sugar cookies. Had she been expecting me? Of course, I realized. The postmistress.

“We were together at an island called Okinawa,” I said. “Which is only a couple hundred miles south and east of the Japanese home islands.”

“Did you know about this new bomb, an atomic bomb I think they called it?”

“No, ma'am, but from what they're reporting, I suspect the war against Japan will end pretty soon, hopefully without the need to invade. The Okinawa invasion was bad enough.”

She nodded. “We listen to the evening news, of course, but the radio correspondents seem to always have a very optimistic slant on how things are going.”

I smiled. “That's called propaganda, I think,” I said. “But in fact, Okinawa has been taken, and now the Army Air Forces are systematically pulverizing the home islands. I am, however, well out of it.”

I explained my medical retirement after only ten years in the Navy, and she displayed some sympathy. “Does it bother you?” she asked. “That you must leave the Navy? It was everything to Dutch.”

“Yes and no, Mrs. Van Arnhem,” I replied. “The Okinawa campaign was very hard on the Navy, and I myself will be a long time healing, I think.” I told her in relatively sanitized terms about what had happened to me and the ship. My ship. One of his ships. That thought stopped me for a moment, and she looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

“I am very, very tired,” I said. “Rising to the rank of commander in ten years would have been impossible before the war, and in my case, it happened less because of any personal merit and more because of circumstances.”

She nodded. “Dutch talked about that, before he left for the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, he said, there would be big changes coming to the fusty old Navy. I would love to hear more, Commander, especially since my Dutch is not coming home.”

I hadn't come there to talk about myself, but this charming lady had managed to put me at my ease. I almost felt embarrassed.

“He was buried at sea?” she prompted.

“Yes, ma'am, he was,” I said. “As the captain, I officiated. It was a formal burial ceremony, or as formal as we could make it. He'd only been aboard for a brief time before the attack. He was on the bridge in his unit commander's chair when the attack came.”

She nodded, almost absently, and looked off into the middle distance. A cloud passed over the sun outside, and the room dimmed for a moment. Too much, I told myself. She doesn't want to hear this. Her husband's well and truly gone, consigned to the depths of the Pacific, that great eater of seagoing men and their presumptuous little ships.

“You said you were going to bring me something,” she said finally. “The Navy returned some of his personal effects—uniforms, his sword, some hats.” She looked at me inquiringly with sad eyes.

I took a deep breath and nodded. From inside my coat I removed a silver cigar case. It wasn't entirely appropriate, but I hadn't had much time in Atlanta to find anything else. I handed her the case, which she opened. Inside were his Naval Academy ring, his wedding ring, and an antique flat silver locket with an oval of glass in the front. And inside that …

I think she first focused on the rings. She smiled a smile of sweet sadness, and yet it was as if she were welcoming the rings back home, back to their rightful place. Then she saw the locket.

She gasped and almost dropped it, but then she picked it up with trembling hands and stared at it, her eyes welling up. Oh, God, I thought. I shouldn't have done this. What had I been thinking?

Then she pressed the locket between her tiny hands, closed her eyes, and began to weep. I felt like I should say something, anything, to comfort her, but I recognized that this was a very private moment, a homecoming vastly different from that of the two rings. This was between them. I wasn't even there.

After a few minutes she composed herself. “
You
did this?” she asked in a shaky voice.

“Yes, ma'am, and I'm very sorry to have upset you. I thought—”

“Oh, no,” she said, cutting me off. “Thank you, thank you,
thank
you. How did you know?”

I took a deep breath. “The captain”—I was relieved—“told me that the commodore was married to a very traditional Southern lady. As I recall my history, a locket, with a lock of hair, was an old custom in the South. Since no part of him was ever coming back, I just thought you might appreciate it.”

“My. Dear. God,” she said. “You have no idea.”

Actually, looking at her face, I did. For once I'd done something completely right. I felt good enough about it that I forgot about my aching bones for a few minutes while she sat there clutching that silver locket and rocking gently in her chair.

“Tell me everything, young man,” she said at last. “What he was like, how he looked, what happened at the end. Everything. I haven't seen him for three years, you know. Tell me everything,
please
.”

We spent the next few hours in that living room, sipping on sugary tea, with me telling her probably more than I should have about our time on the Okinawa picket line. Toward the end I began to run out of steam, which was when she took a really good look at me. Then things happened quickly. Homer was dispatched back to Atlanta with, I found out later, a ten-dollar tip. My two bags and I were hustled up to a guest bedroom, complete with a four-poster bed, an armoire, and a huge wooden fan stirring the air above. I was firmly instructed to take a long nap. As I was stowing some of my clothes, the maid who'd brought the tea knocked discreetly on the door and delivered another tray, this one with some fancy crustless sandwiches and a cold beer. Navy family, I remembered. Libations would be available in the parlor at six, dinner at seven, and I was, of course, spending the night. I didn't argue.

I came down at six much refreshed. I would have probably slept until the next morning except that I'd heard female voices out in the upstairs hall. When I got downstairs, wearing the same coat and tie but with a fresh shirt, I got a surprise. A much younger woman was there on the sofa beside Mrs. Van Arnhem, and I recognized her face from that portrait on the commodore's desk. Turned out her name was Julia, and she was, as I'd thought, their daughter. She'd arrived from Atlanta while I was sleeping off my cross-country trip.

Julia looked more like her father than her mother, with dark brown hair, sly brown eyes, and a very pretty face that would not have been out of place in
Gone With the Wind.
While her mother affected the mannerisms and dress of the nineteenth century, Julia was very much a denizen of the twentieth, if her stylish dress and sophisticated way of carrying herself were any indication. Her lipstick was vividly red, and there was a cigarette case on the coffee table in front of her that I was pretty sure did not belong to the lady of the house. She had elegant, slim legs and looked as if she knew her way around an after-hours nightclub. She gave me a frankly appraising look when we were introduced, which immediately had me wondering how well I'd scored. Given that I was twenty-five pounds underweight, with the remains of dark circles under my eyes and a way of moving that probably resembled a large but injured insect, I suspected not very well. This young lady looked like she regularly feasted on handsome, rich playboys up in Atlanta, assuming there still were any rich playboys, that is. I realized then there was a lot I didn't know about the United States of America in late 1945. I wondered if I was going to like it.

After supper we migrated to the living room for coffee. Julia offered me a cigarette when she lit up and seemed faintly disappointed that I didn't join her. Her mother excused herself after a little while. Julia promptly got up, went to a small sidebar I hadn't noticed, and poured a couple of cognacs for us. I asked her what she did for a living.

“I'm in the finance department of a large bank up in Atlanta,” she said. “Investments, putting commercial deals together. That sort of thing.”

“The only thing I know about finance is that it went off the rails in 1929,” I said. I remembered the pay cut the Army and the Navy took in the mid-1930s as a result of the Depression that followed.

She nodded. “It's making its way back,” she said. “Especially in Atlanta. That city is going to boom one day, and I wanted to be in place when it does.”

“Are there that many women in finance?” I asked.

“There are now,” she said. “Well, not very many, but more than none. The war did wonders for women's opportunities in business. It'll be interesting to see what happens when all those men come back home.”

“You think women will be pushed out?”

“I think that the competition is going to be really fierce,” she said. “That's why I plan to start my own company this year. It'll depend on how many clients I can poach from the bank when I leave, but I want to have it in place when everybody starts looking for work. How about you? What are you going to do once this horrible war ends?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Actually, I've been medically retired, so I'm really out of the Navy now. They say I'm physically unfit for active duty after Okinawa.”

She nodded. “What will you do for money, then?” she asked.

The financier, I thought, getting right to the point. “I've got almost four years of paychecks saved up,” I said. “I'm not married, so I just banked it. I'll be okay for a while, I think.”

“That's good, because unemployment is going to go through the roof after the war. The economy's going to contract hard until the politicians get another war going somewhere. Europe is devastated. That's going to take a decade to fix, and somehow we're going to have to find a way to get the Germans back to work. They're the only ones who really do work over there, you know.”

“Sounds like interesting times ahead,” I said. “I may just sit them out.”

She gave me a strange look, seemed to make some kind of decision, finished her cigarette and her cognac, and then looked at her watch. “I've got to get up early tomorrow and get back to the city,” she said. “But right now I'd like you to meet someone. I'll be right back.”

I sat back in my comfortable chair and looked around the parlor, with its twelve-foot-high molded ceilings, real if slightly shabby wallpaper, and furnishings from what looked like the 1880s if not earlier. What do they do way out here in the sticks, I wondered. There'd been crops in the fields, but who was tending to the farm if all the men were gone?

“Commander Miles,” Julia said, coming back into the room, “I'd like to introduce my younger sister, Olivia. Livy, this is Commander Connie Miles, of the United States Navy. He brought back Father's rings, and the locket.”

On Julia's arm was a vision, dressed all in white. Olivia was probably late twenties, slim, taller than her sister, with gorgeous blond hair and one of those faces that make perfectly intelligent men walk into lampposts. She was hanging on lightly to Julia's left arm, and then I saw why: Those gorgeous blue eyes saw nothing at all. Olivia Van Arnhem was blind.

“Olivia,” I said, rising to my feet. “A pleasure to meet you.”

She turned her head in my direction and I tried not to stare at her, then realized, I could if I wanted to—she couldn't see me. Julia could, though, and she gave me a sympathetic look that seemed to say,
A terrible waste, isn't it?
She steered Olivia to the big sofa and sat down beside her, not holding her up, but close enough that Olivia would know she was right there.

“Commander,” Olivia said, in a soft Southern drawl, something Julia had dispensed with. “You did a wonderful thing, bringing that locket. It meant the world to Mother.”

“I was almost afraid to bring it,” I said. “The longer I thought about it, the bigger intrusion it seemed. But…”

“Yes,” Olivia said, “but we're very grateful you did. I can still remember the day that car came up the drive and those two officers got out. Mother went stiff as a board, and that's how I knew why they were here. She'd been so confident, you know. He was a senior officer, a commodore, and so less exposed to danger than younger officers. Or so we all thought.”

“He was a little bit safer when he was down in the fleet anchorage,” I said. “Being a commodore. But then he came north to the picket line when things got really tough. I think he knew I needed help, and I was very glad to have him embark. Now I wish he'd stayed at the anchorage.”

“The picket line,” Olivia said. “The anchorage. Commodore. I don't really know what those words mean, Commander. You must tell me about them.”

Julia looked again at her watch and then stood up. “Livy,” she said, “I've got to get to bed. I'm sure the commander can get you back to your room when you tire.”

Olivia smiled at a secret thought. “Come back soon, Jules,” she said.

Julia gave me a little finger wave and went upstairs. Olivia gestured for me to join her on the couch. “Bring one of those cognacs, if you'd be so kind.”

I did, wondering how she knew we'd been having a cognac, and then I remembered the stories of how the other senses of the blind become much more acute. I sat down next to her, steered the glass into her hand, and clinked mine against hers. She smiled again and took a sip.

“When I tire,” she said, repeating Julia's words and shaking her head. “I'm blind, not a fucking invalid.”

I choked on my cognac, and she started laughing.

“Gotcha,” she said. “Now you must call me Livy.”

*   *   *