Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [162]
Ensign Ducely went queer, too, falling ragingly in love with a corset advertisement in the New Yorker. To Willie’s eye the nameless maiden in the advertisement was like a thousand other clothing models he had seen in magazines-arched brows, big eyes, angular cheeks, pouting mouth, a fetching figure, and a haughty, revolted look, as though someone had just offered her a jellyfish to hold. But Ducely swore that this was the woman he had searched for all his life. He wrote off letters to the magazine and the clothing firm asking for her name and address, and he also wrote to friends in three New York advertising agencies, begging them to track her down. If his efficiency had been around twenty-five per cent of normal before, it now dropped to zero. He languished on his bunk, sighing over the corset ad, by day and by night.
Willie took uneasy note of these peculiarities. They reminded him of incidents in novels about men on long sea voyages, and there was a not quite pleasant amusement in seeing the classic symptoms popping out in his shipmates. And then he himself was stricken. One day the thought occurred to him, as he was drinking coffee on the bridge during a watch, that it would be rather elegant to have his own monogrammed coffee mug. In itself the notion was not odd, but his response to it was. In a few minutes, a monogrammed coffee mug came to seem to him the most wonderful imaginable possession on earth. He could not pay attention to the watch for thinking of the mug. He could see it floating in the air before his eyes. When he was relieved he rushed to the shipfitter’s shack, borrowed a small file, and spent several hours gouging “WK” into a crockery cup with a jeweler’s precision and delicacy while the dinner hour passed and night fell. He filled the excavated letters with a rich blue paint, and laid the mug tenderly in his desk drawer to dry, cushioned with socks and underwear. When he was wakened at 4 A.M. to go on watch his first thought was of the mug. He took it out of the drawer and sat gloating over it like a girl over a love letter, so he was ten minutes late in relieving, and drew a snarl from the weary Keefer. The following afternoon he brought the cup up. to the bridge and casually handed it to the signalman Urban, asking him to fill it from the radar-shack Silex. The envious, admiring glances of the sailors filled Willie with pleasure.
Next morning, coming on the bridge again with his wonderful cup, Willie was enraged to see Urban drinking out of a mug monogrammed “LU,” just like his own. He took this as a personal insult. He soon saw that a rash of monogrammed mugs had broken out throughout the ship. The boatswain’s mate Winston carried one etched with an insignia in fine Old English lettering, with heraldic flourishes. Willie’s monogram was a kindergarten work compared to this, and to a dozen other sailors’ cups. He angrily threw his mug into the sea that night.
In this long nightmare time, Willie spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours daydreaming about May Wynn, staring at her pictures, or reading and re-reading her letters. She was his one link with what had once been his life. His civilian existence now seemed a perfumed glamorous unreality, like a Hollywood movie about high society. Reality was the rolling minesweeper, and the sea, and shabby khakis, and binoculars, and the captain’s buzzer. He wrote wildly passionate letters to the girl, and with the greatest difficulty edited out any references to marriage. It made him uneasy and guilty to send off these letters, because as time passed he suspected more and more that he was not going to marry May. If he ever came back alive he wanted peace and luxury, not a struggling inept marriage with a coarse singer. So his reason informed him; but reason had little to do with the hours of romantic fantasy