The Last Ship (67 page)

Now having under my command a ship’s company which had undergone such deprivation now going on to eleven months, I was in no way surprised at the dramatic change that occurred as the Arrangement proceeded. In those weeks that followed, a kind of deliciousness reigned in our settlement. A kind of new peace. Properly to understand these matters, one has to remember that the participants had long been shipmates and through as difficult tribulations of the sea as one could readily imagine had been brought to a closeness extraordinary even for that calling. And the fact was this: Without in any way disturbing that bond, they became something else altogether, something as it were grafted onto it: became men and women. This accomplishment was in no way fortuitous. Indeed I believe it was that previous relationship that made it work. At least so far. Jealousy, possessiveness, the feared disturbances that might attend the required mathematics—if these were to arrive at some future date, they had not thus far done so, certainly not in any ostensible way. Another less lofty reason surely coming into play as well: The men had been informed by the very terms of the Arrangement that any expression of these attributes would be grounds for the culprit’s expulsion from the Arrangement altogether; he would become a man without a woman. Powerful restraint, this; the women not only having all the power in themselves; all the provisions they had laid down being backed up as well by the full power of Navy authority—represented in myself.

Still, I believe it was the higher concern that was the driving force: the idea that we were all unalterably in this together exactly as we had been for so long in everything and would continue to be for the remainder of our lives, insofar as we could see the future; that we were as attached to one another as is one cell to another in the body’s own arrangement, that to cause harm to another was to inflict it on oneself; that a serious deviation in one of us from that dedication, that fixed standard of conduct, in which after all as Navy men and women we were so ingrained, could initiate a terrible tide surge through the entire community, with unforeseen results. I think every hand felt to the deepest part of the soul that individual responsibility. We were brothers; sisters. The subdivision now allowed of being also men, women: It did not disturb the other. The case was just the opposite; it was precisely that bond that made possible with this ship’s company what might have had but a finite chance of working with another assortment of human beings. This new thing became but a delight, a very great one, added to the previous idiosyncratic relationship. And if I had to mention one factor above all that was its secret, I would say without hesitation: gentleness. It was accompanied by, embraced in, a great gentleness. Evidenced to myself by, among other signs, the striking fact that the men did not talk about it. I never heard a word from them as to what went on in the cottages, none of that prurient discourse which is not unknown among men having had their experiences with women, most of it also containing sure overtones of vanity. None whatsoever of that. I did not find this strange. It was portion of that respect—that infinite gratitude to them—yes, that something like the worship of women that now pervaded the settlement, in its quiet sort of way; for doing what they were doing; and simply for being what they were: women.

One saw an unmistakable new ease in the faces of the sailors, men and women both, the visible reflection of an inner quietening-down, a newfound and deep-reaching harmony, as they went about their regular duties, whether in the Farm detail under Gunner Delaney or the fishing detail under Boatswain’s Mate Silva (both of these men, as it happened, assigned to Operations Specialist Dillon), or the settlement-upkeep detail under Noisy Travis (himself, though, one of the seven abstainers). Men were better, women were better. One felt something else with the women: their absolute sense of being in control. Far from objecting to it, the men appeared to feel that this suzerainty was not only proper: It was the only way the thing would have stood a chance of working.

In addition to my own observations as to these matters I had another source in a position to know to the most precise degree the actual state of affairs: Lieutenant Girard, the leader of the women. In our regular weekly session on supply and morale matters, the subject assuredly falling in the latter category, she reported to me in general terms developments in this area. (We had learned, I should add, in fact did so instinctively, to treat the subject with the calm, seamanlike matter-of-factness with which we dealt with all others, this impulse springing from her particularly in this instance, than for which approach there was nothing I could have been more grateful.) Such as after the Arrangement had been in operation about a month:

“There have been only those two transfers of men from one woman to another,” she said one day. This was under the “incompatibility” clause of the Arrangement. “Frankly, I would have expected more.”

As before, I was careful to stay out of all this in any detail. I would not have dreamed of asking for names. I left everything concerned with it to her and through her to the women. She had now become absolute commander of the women, their loyalty insofar as they were women transferred to her in a sovereignty as total as my own general sovereignty; perhaps, given that added instinctual women’s loyalty to one another that I believe I noted at one point . . . given this to start with and build on, perhaps even more so. In fact, I wished to hear about it as little as possible, though there was no way as ship’s captain I could allow myself to be closed off completely from so urgent a matter. I believe she knew this, and accordingly kept the references brief, simply the usual reports as to how matters were progressing. I did interject a word now and then, even the glancing question.

“The morale?”

“It has never been better, sir.”

The subject never overtly mentioned now, nonetheless that sense of expectancy hung in the air—it would have been impossible for it not to do so. It would have been unthinkable to broach the matter, to pose specific inquiries; still one waited; knew furthermore that everyone in ship’s company, every participant, man and woman, equally waited. Even Bixby making a point of reporting to me as a supposedly unrelated matter the fact that our goats, now doubled to four from their original two and both of them nannies, were in thriving health. One could not ask questions about it. One did not need to do so. The moment it happened Girard would tell me. Nor would she wait for our weekly meeting. She would come to me at once.

As to that inerrable sense of sexual fulfillment all about, manifest as the tall trees, that makes men so different, I must reemphasize the Jesuit’s role. What he had done was effectively to remove the monster guilt, which otherwise at the least would have tainted many of those relationships in the twenty-four cottages, indeed made many impossible. It was ship’s company coming around to his own view, as I have earlier suggested, that expelled whatever hesitations there may have been about the arrangements (save for the abstaining seven)—and there had been many of these, and probably more in the men even than in the women. (I would be the last to deny that some of our people were quite ready to be converted, some even not requiring such in the least, but many more still at first holding back, uncertain as to the proposed methods, and from what have always been considered the highest of motives.) It was a remarkable personal triumph. He had infused the settlement with his belief, constituting an absolute sanctioning, that not only was there nothing wrong with these procedures but that they embodied the most upright and essential conduct, amounting to nothing less than a clear obligation. Having become persuaded as to that, they could put it out of their minds and have fun. Few fulfillments in life are so rewarding as knowing that the act you are performing is not only one of the highest satisfaction but is also in the glory of a cause and one’s duty in the bargain. Not that I believe the Navy men and women, being the quite down-to-earth human beings they were, dwelt on these matters as they went about their pleasures in the cottages. It was rather that what might have been an inhibiting factor was obliterated from their minds so that they could proceed to do what women and men like to do when left alone. I recalled the doc’s term employed by him sometime before the activation of the Arrangement: the “intermittent neuroses” with which he described many of ship’s company as being from time to time affected. These to all appearances had entirely disappeared, the doc himself so informing me in his wry, somewhat cynical manner: “Now I wonder why?”

And so the weeks went by. With all the beneficences, I am obliged to report that one event occurred to jar us for a time out of them. One woman—Susan Dillon—disappeared from the settlement. The most thorough search of the island, all hands turned out to reconnoiter it inch by inch, turned up nothing. I think all of us in our secret souls presumed—no one, at least insofar as I knew, ever once mentioning this speculation—that she had found herself unable to cope with the Arrangement.

Another thought entered my mind, troubling me. She was an operations specialist, one of the air trackers who monitored our Tomahawks to touchdown at Orel. Like anyone who made it in that job she was a very smart sailor. It occurred to me that she was the second of those, and the only other woman who did that piece of work, to disappear; the other one, Emily Austin, having done so some months back, not long after we came to the island. I pondered. I had another passing thought: Dillon’s lovers included Silva, the doc, Selmon, Delaney, Preston.

 *  *  * 

We were well into the third month of the Arrangement when Lieutenant Girard informed me almost routinely that the women had decided upon and put into effect a change in one of the terms, a kind of codicil added to the original list. Article 2, I believe it was, this stating that no man would be moved from his assigned woman to another more than once, and this for reasons only of incompatibility, and then only at the women’s discretion. That day she put the matter to me thus:

“Captain, the women have decided to shift the men around more. From one woman to another. In effect, a rather complete changing about in that respect.”

She did not give me the reason. She had no need to do so. I felt pass through from her to me the first distant intimation of concern since the Arrangement commenced. She continued in those emotionless briefing tones.

“Actually, rather simply done. One woman’s group moving to another woman; that woman receiving another’s; and so on.”

“I get the picture,” I said, noncommittally, having no desire to hear further details.

“With this new procedure, within a certain time every woman will have been with every man.”

“The women want that?”

I had made a dreadful mistake in asking that, and knew it instantly; a stupid and terrible mistake. It had just popped out. I saw something like anger flash from her eyes. Then she waited, not wanting to speak out of that; considerate of myself. When she said it, did so in the most matter-of-fact if quite brisk way.

“All the women want is babies, sir.”

“Of course. Forgive my lapse in perception.”

Her eyes rested on me in what I felt actually to be a kindly expression.

“I remain very hopeful,” she said.

So it was that meantime all hands, men and women both, continued so, rather immensely better for the availability of one another that was by now so fully established as to have become an entirely normal part of the functioning of our community. As I said at the outset, all this came as no surprise. Ship’s captains know about these things. There was only one person in the settlement who was not better. The ship’s captain.

 *  *  * 

Inevitably there would drift to me emanations of the most erotic goings-on in those cottages set among the trees. At first enjoying a kind of vicarious happiness in the fact that my ship’s company were at last accommodated with the one important thing that had been missing in their increasingly fulfilled lives on the island, this feeling began after a while to transmute itself, by the slowest of degrees and only over a period of time, into something quite different. Like all the men around me I had been able to block out the idea of that emollience with considerable success over the many months of our adversities: besides, we were intensely occupied with matters of survival, which is perhaps the one force that can turn the focus of men away from such a fundamental drive. But now no perils pressed us, no enemies loomed on the horizon, hunger had fled into the distance, we were home free on what was turning more and more into quite a rewarding island, and all these thoughts that normally occupy the mind of an unfulfilled man returned. In my instance, to have these matters proceeding but a few steps away . . . it became difficult. Very difficult. Something intolerable about it. And there was not a thing in the world I could do about it.

To no Navy man will this need explaining. It would simply not have worked for the ship’s captain to participate exactly as the other men participated: as one of five or six men—I sometimes lost track of the exact figure—assigned to a given woman. Nothing in it would have worked. There is no law of the sea more ancient, more unforgiving, than the one that proclaims that “fraternization” between a captain and those whom he commands is among the deadliest of traps the life of a ship presents him, however noble the intent, leading ineluctably to a slow diminution of the ship’s captain’s authority and sovereignty, and thereby eventually to the gravest of consequences, not excepting the putting of the ship herself at hazard. Lonely as he is, even in normal circumstances, a ship’s captain is sometimes sorely beset by the temptation to step across that rigid line the sea, knowing all, in its wisdom long ago drew. To do so is folly; the captain who succumbs to it certain to reap, not respect and friendship, but their opposites. It simply does not work with a ship’s company, a canon so absolute that no intelligent ship’s captain questions it. And this—this ultimate fraternization as it were: It simply could not be. And so it was that I increasingly found myself living in a kind of erotic hell: envisionings, increasing in the particularities of their persecuting vividness, as to all the things going on in the cottages; quite explicit, almost photographic images of the women of my ship’s company . . . yes, of Meyer, of Talley, of Garber, of Alice Bixby. At first hard to objectify them as being women as opposed to sailors . . . Then, realizing they were now the former in every sense and to a degree consummate . . . A torment seized me. The names paraded incessantly through my mind . . . the names of the women I had known only as sailors under my command. Then one day the name Lieutenant Girard. And I stopped.