Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [273]
The fact is, my sweet darling, that this sex attraction has almost ruined our lives, because in my idiotic, immature, snobbish mind it came to seem a trap. After Yosemite my mother fairly talked me out of marrying you by hitting and hammering the idea that I was in the toils of sex. If you want to know what has changed I can’t tell you. A lot of things have happened to me in the last five months, and the sum total of everything is that I have grown up five years in that time, and can now safely say that I am out of my adolescent fog, however far I am from being a man. I see this much clearly, that you and I are a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. I can’t understand how or why you came to care for me, being stronger, wiser, prettier, possessed of more earning power, and in every way better than I am. Maybe my Princeton chatter helped, in which case thank God for Princeton. I know that the snob idea of marrying into a quote good family-large crimson unquote-can mean nothing to you. Whatever it is, your loving me is fantastic luck.
Sweetheart, this is like the breaking of a dam, I don’t know what to write down first. The main thing is this, will you marry me the next time I come home? Whether the war is still on or whether it’s over? I somehow think it will be over in a few months. If it is, here’s what I want to do. I want to go back to school and get an M.A. and maybe a Ph.D. if the money holds out and then get a college instructor’s job, I don’t care where, but preferably in a small town. About money: it won’t be my mother’s money. Dad, God rest his soul, left me an insurance policy which can see me through two or three years of schooling; and I can work on the side, tutoring or something; and maybe the government will help veterans the way they did in the last war. Anyway, that part can work out. By the way, my dad several times told me I ought to marry you, in an indirect way. He sensed that I’d found something wonderful.
I know I want to teach. As in everything else, you understood me perfectly in this regard. I’ve been exec now on the Caine for a couple of months (Christ, there’s a lot of news I have to tell you-wait a while) and I’ve been running an education program with these Armed Forces Institute courses among the sailors. I can’t describe to you the pleasure I get out of helping the men get started on subjects that interest them, and counseling them in their work, and watching them improve and learn. It feels like the work I’m cut out for. As for the piano playing, how far could I ever get? I have no talent, I can simply play the piano and invent slightly off-color rhymes, a nice parlor trick for Saturday nights. The whole night-club life, those damned customers with their dead floury faces and the stinking air and the same thing night after night after night-the whole stale gummy mess of pseudo-sex, pseudo-music, pseudo-wit-not for me. Not for you. You’re like a diamond on a garbage pile, in those night clubs.
About religion. (First things first-there’s so much to say!) I never have been religious, but I have seen too much of the stars and the sun and people’s lives working out, out here at sea, to go on ignoring God. I attend services when I can. I’m a sort of pale Christian. Catholicism has always scared me, and I don’t understand it. We can talk about it. If you want to bring up the children as Catholics, well, I guess a Christian is a Christian. I would prefer not to be married in a ritual I don’t understand-I’m being as frank with you as is necessary, because the chips are down-but