The Last Ship (15 page)

I suddenly realized it was a kind of conversation we had never had, indeed that I could not remember ever having with a living being. I caught myself. I was letting her into my soul and a captain must never do that. It is not permitted him. I was aware of the stillness in the cabin, something anticipatory and oddly fervent in it, aware suddenly of a remarkably percipient human being listening intently, perhaps too intently. For a moment it was almost as if another young woman than the one I knew as Lieutenant Girard sat there. It was time to bring it back and I briskly did so.

“Let’s get out of Massachusetts. Anything else, Lieutenant?”

And she was herself again, too, just as quickly, the subordinate naval officer attentive to the wishes and needs of her captain.

“That’s it, sir.” She invariably, and with the small, rather humorous sigh that came now, employed that phrase to end our discussion and always, such was my confidence in this officer, I felt that we had covered all important matters, that there was none, however formidable the problem, she would let slip through. She prepared to go. I waited a moment before dismissing her.

I sat back in my chair. I had hesitated. Too much so, I decided. A captain must move into a matter. The job is not meant for timid souls. I decided to test these waters, but with discretion, by a necessary indirection.

“Lieutenant,” I said casually, “you wanted gunnery, didn’t you? And qualified for it.”

“Affirmative to both, sir. The sea billet wasn’t available.”

“Why gunnery?”

Always unruffled, never failing to appear in effortless control of herself, she now seemed mildly surprised, as if it were an intimate question I had asked. But she also appeared rather pleased than otherwise at the question, and a little whimsical.

“I guess because I thought that was what a Navy ship was all about. To use those guns; those missiles. Whatever I went into, I wanted to be in the center of it, of what was important, why the thing was there in the first place. I hope that doesn’t sound too . . .” she hesitated and with that faint, almost mocking smile, used a strange word: “. . . pushy.”

“Pushy? Well, to be in the middle of something . . . the best reason I can think of. Of course you wanted to get to sea even more.”

“Aye, sir.”

And so I made this peripheral talk, all the while pondering her; so artful in picking up the least signal sent in her presence, certain to see that I had something on my mind, perhaps even to see what it was. But I had been unable to think of a way to bring the matter forth naturally, without carrying suggestion itself. The words would not come to my lips.

There obtained an additional constraint. Aboard ship certain things must not be blurted out as probable facts or even likely surmise until one has arrived at a resolute certainty, the reason being that in the tight and enclosed world of a vessel at sea, where words spread like wildfire, until a thing presents itself in the form of some actual outbreak among the crew, some tangible incident, the very act of articulation can serve to create what was not there; for talk itself is the most dangerous enemy of all to the well-being of a ship, where words come back only as echoes, with no outside world to check against for an independent judgment, to correct perhaps an unstable one. One learns to treat language with care, as in the handling of lethal ammunition stores; in the present matter one felt the caution insistent in the extreme. It was in these devilish latitudes that I now navigated, and her with me. The very last thing I should do was to ask direct questions. It is almost always a mistake and now would be a foolish, stupid, even dangerous thing to do. A captain who has to ask has already lost control. A general question. I could, safely put that. (If she wished to make a connection between the mention of gunnery and the next matter, that was up to her.) I decided to make the question rather abrupt after all—as if in that way to keep off it any sense of urgency, of undue import, to make it, insofar as possible, extraneous, something off an agenda, an inquiry a ship’s captain might make, for instance, as to the length of a binnacle list.

“How are the women doing, Lieutenant?”

“The women, sir?” I felt immediately an equivocation. In her role of morale officer we had often discussed the welfare of ship’s company in general; had never discussed the women as women.

“Why, they’re doing fine, sir,” was all the answer I got, seeming a deliberate inanity and thus, coming from her, almost bewildering. “Did you have something specific in mind, Captain?”

Something hung in the air, withheld in the suddenly tense hush; something new. I looked into those cool gray eyes. I felt they saw everything and told, now, nothing; that she knew to the last shading what I meant. Still she had to pretend otherwise. Just as did I. Or perhaps she had simply determined not to let me get away with it; to force it back upon me. And so she had murmured—with entire design it seemed to me—the question she knew full well I could not answer.

“No, Lieutenant. It was only a general question,” I said.

“Why, sir,” she said, curiously brightening, “the women are doing like the men are doing. Carrying on.”

This astonished me. It seemed a dodge, a blatant circumvention.

“No better, no worse?” I smiled thinly. I could hear the different tone in my voice, moving to meet this change, dry, an edge in it. “Than the men, I mean.”

“Well, if you put it that way, sir. I would say slightly better.” Said almost as if they had resources unknown to other sailors. Now it was she who gave a soft, almost evanescent smile, of a kind I was left to make of what I might. I did not like the answer; liked even less what she then added oddly, with its faint touch of the superior. “The women will be all right, Captain.”

This statement increased a kind of angry wariness I could feel as having appeared within myself, bringing with it suddenly a sense of danger lying just below the surface, something about it infinitely threatening. Apart from having the highest rank, she was a natural leader of the women. The women in their rigorously segregated quarters must talk over any number of things. There was nothing to keep them from talking over anything, and no man’s ear ever hearing. It was not inconceivable that they might, in present circumstances, come to consider their first allegiance to themselves, to their own fraternity of womanhood. The very idea of the possible existence of such an entity, never having remotely occurred to me until this instant, was itself deeply unsettling; further, wholly inadmissible. Not only can it not be recognized, given any official standing whatsoever; nothing is more expressly, categorically forbidden aboard ship than cliques of any kind. And I could think of none more unacceptable, striking at the very functioning of the ship, than one consisting only of women; I would come down on it instantly, ruthlessly, with every force and power I possessed. The further idea that Lieutenant Girard might be the active leader of such a body . . . my mind moving backward to cast into suspicions matters that at the time had seemed routine, innocent, now appearing perhaps done with every intent, pondering the training of the women in small-arms usage . . . I stopped this. I did not remotely know any of these things as facts; had no manifest basis for suspecting them as such; they barely qualified as speculations; fearful suddenly of suspicion itself, another of those elements that can perilously flower and prosper, and in a peculiarly virulent manner, in the intimacy of shipboard life; once it starts, separating the real from the imagined becoming an authentic problem of its own. Any captain knows to be vigilant against the latter, and quickly to discard it unless tangible cause can be found. And I did so here. The hostility which I perhaps concealed at her answer, at these ambiguities in general, remained; indeed I could feel it growing, that impatience when I could not get what I felt was due me as captain of this ship, my voice close to the caustic, replying to her “The women will be all right.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Is that all, sir?” The question itself: Customarily, in the Navy way, she waited for me to dismiss her. Now it was as if she were anxious to get away before I should probe her further.

I sat vastly vexed with this blurry imprecision, the indeterminateness—something I had never got from her—I was ending up with; feeling the strain, merging into distress, that had by now invested the cabin; aware of having gotten exactly nowhere. I sat frustrated—thwarted and displeased, even on the edges of outright displayed anger, suppressing it only by the reminded conviction I had long held that of all tools anger is the stupidest; I had rarely seen it serve any useful purpose; generally only paralyze the intelligence. Steadying myself inwardly, I had about given up hope in the matter for today, with the intention either of coming at Girard at another time or of approaching the Jesuit, with his devices including the confession box, lately overcrowded and sometimes available to me by a highly circumspect indirection. Abruptly I dismissed her.

“That’s it, Miss Girard,” in those words hearing now a distinct curtness.

“Then until tomorrow morning, sir.”

Perhaps it was her seeing of these things in me—the sum of my displeasure—that made it happen; perhaps that had no effect at all and she had simply decided that her strategy now called for her to take one positive step. I would never know. In any event, having half risen to go, she sat back and spoke.

“There is one thing, Captain. The women?” she said, with a curiously interrogatory note, as if speaking of some different, possibly higher species. She looked at me. “Well, sir . . .” She hesitated and then said: “The women are beginning to feel . . . well, outnumbered.”

It was as though General Quarters had sounded in the pit of my stomach. I had been looking out the port at the lagoon, perhaps seeking some lenitive effect from its own benign peacefulness, perhaps just looking deliberately away from her, to show my dissatisfaction with this turn in our conversation. My head snapped around. I waited, letting things come very still in me, my mind bringing all its power to bear on that strange word. In the tense silence I spoke with a deliberate quiet; but just as intentionally with a hard and insistent edge in my voice.

“Outnumbered? What in the world does that mean, Lieutenant? Has something happened? Something specific? You must tell me at once.”

“No, sir,” she said. Her voice was undisturbed, in no way intimidated; equally, in no way aggressive. “Nothing specific. It’s a feeling, sir.”

I had had enough of this. I looked out once more at the lagoon; back at her, where her eyes awaited mine; and looking full into them spoke more sharply, coldly, than ever I had to her.

“It’s difficult for a captain to act on feelings, Miss Girard. I would like a straight answer.”

“I’m not asking you to act, sir. I thought it my duty to convey to you . . . I am morale officer.”

My tone of voice, my manner, found no echo in hers, continuing to speak with all her wonted self-possession, her impregnable composure, on the outside; and yet, something I seemed to feel within her, a certain intensity I had not sensed there before. It was almost as if she were trying to give me a warning, urgent in nature, if I had ears to hear.

“Of course it is. Of course you are. Is there anything else you wish to say?”

“Just that, sir.”

It was all very well to say you were supposed to treat them the same. What a stupid idea that was; for starters: Harshness with a woman simply makes her close down. I tried to speak more softly, not certain as to how much I succeeded in doing so. Something also in myself telling me I should pursue the matter no further with her today; come down on her no harder; not make demands, not insist on something more definite; not in the heat of this atmosphere; not anymore at all today.

“I’m glad you mentioned it. You were quite right to do so. You will continue to keep me informed, is that clear? Especially of anything remotely substantive.”

“Aye, sir. It’s clear.”

If any residue of hostility remained, it appeared to be exclusively in myself. She walked to the door, taking her inviolate serenity—and, it seemed, her sureness of something undefined—with her. Her body and her way of carrying it were pliant and without effort, eurythmic, a grace by second nature, as though it were something she never had to give a thought to; impossible of making an awkward movement. I could see the shimmering water of the lagoon beyond, seeming to backdrop, and to outline, her woman’s figure. But I was not looking at the lagoon. I was looking first at the back of her head and the pure grain of wheat-light hair, then all down her body, slender and cool, across her seat, down her legs, the clean white smartness of the uniform seeming to enhance as it were her womanhood; whilst I did, having the eerie conviction that she knew I was doing so. Then she was gone and I sat looking out at only the unobstructed lagoon. Feeling a tremor through all my being, a dampness breaking out all over me as from a fever. In this male stronghold of ships I felt suddenly enveloped in femininity, in its impenetrable mysteries, its unknown and perhaps unknowable secrets, its very scents—its snares, its traps. And then I knew.

 *  *  * 

I stepped through the opposite door onto the small catwalk perch, holding room for hardly more than one person, that the ship’s designers had placed immediately outside the captain’s cabin and made accessible only from it; a private place, a tiny quarterdeck, extending outward enough to fulfill its purpose of giving the ship’s captain a view along the entire starboard length of the ship, of the Number 1 missile launcher and the five-inch gun forward, of the 20mm Phalanx and the Number 2 launcher aft, then straight down to the sea itself directly below where one stood. From it the captain could take in at a glance the physical state of the ship and yet not himself be seen unless some hand aft—he could not be seen at all from forward—consciously raised his head and looked up there, which none ever did. I had stood on that catwalk, the sea rushing past beneath me, ten thousand times, a thing that normally filled me with both comfort and exhilaration, for nowhere did I feel ship and sea—the lords of my life—more. Now in the late morning warmth of the climbing sun I gazed at the island, at the pure beauty of it, and felt only the onset of a dark and all-encompassing foreboding.