Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [275]
It occurs to me, of course, that life as the wife of a drudge on a college faculty may not appeal to you. There’s nothing I can say to that except that if you love me you’ll come anyway and give it a try. I think you will like it. You don’t know anything but New York and Broadway. There is another world of green grass and quiet and sunshine and pleasant, cultivated people, and I think after a while you will love it. Also you will be a spark of life in that environment-It’s somewhat soporific and unreal, that’s its main drawback-and maybe you will spur me on to do some worth-while work instead of just droning the same drone from year to year. Anyway all this is around the edges. It all comes back to whether you still feel, as I now do, that we belong to each other.
For God’s sake write as soon as you can. Forgive all my stupidity; don’t revenge yourself by taking your time. Are you well? Still wowing the customers and causing pop eyes under all the crew haircuts lined up at the bar? The last time I was in the Grotto I wanted to fight ten guys for the way they were looking at you. Why I didn’t recognize my feelings for what they were I will never know. As for Mother, May, don’t think about her, or if you do, don’t be bitter. I suspect she’ll come around. If she doesn’t she will simply deprive herself of whatever pleasure she might have in seeing us happy together. Nothing she says or does will make any difference. Mother hasn’t had much of a life, despite her money. At this point I’m sorry for her but not sorry enough to give up my wife for her. That’s that.
Well, it’s now a quarter past two in the morning, and I could easily write into the dawn and not be tired. I wish, my sweet, that I might have proposed to you in the most beautiful place in the world with music and perfume all around instead of pounding out an incoherent letter in a dismal ship’s office, which you will receive all crumpled and dirty. But if this letter can make you half as happy as your answer saying yes would me, then no trappings could make it any better.
I love you, May. Write quickly, quickly.
WILLIE
He read this letter over perhaps twenty times, cutting a phrase here, inserting a sentence there. He finally became numb to its meaning. Then he copied it all over on the typewriter, dropped the papers in his room, and made himself a cup of coffee. It was four o’clock when he picked up the smooth draft and read it for the last time. He got a very clear picture of how it would strike May: astounding, somewhat groveling, wild, and babbling-but still, the truth. There were a dozen more places where he wanted to correct it, but he decided to let it go. It was impossible to make it a good, dignified letter; he was in a bad, undignified position. He was crawling back to a girl he had jilted. No words could change that. If she still loved him-and he was fairly sure she did, judging by their last kiss-then she would swallow his foolishness and her pride and accept him. That was all he wanted, and this proposal sufficed for it, if any would. He sealed the letter up, dropped it in the ship’s mailbox, and went to sleep, feeling that life from now on, failing another Kamikaze, would be an empty wait while his letter went halfway around the world and the answer returned the same long way.
Not only Willie was becalmed; the Caine was, too. The resourceful repair men of the Pluto quickly patched up the damage on the deckhouse; but they grubbed around in the smashed fireroom for two weeks, and concluded that mending the boiler was not a job for them. It could be done, they said, only by diverting an excessive amount of the tender’s time