Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [29]
Willie opened the envelope with a thrust of his forefinger and yanked out the sheaf of papers. His eye darted to the third paragraph. The words seemed to rise up at him with a sound of trumpets: Report to Receiving Station, San Francisco, for transportation to
DMS 22-U.S.S. CAINE.
PART TWO
THE CAINE
CHAPTER 6
Dr. Keith’s Letter
When Ensign Keith followed the bellboy into his room in the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, he was struck at once by the view of the city in the sunset. The hills were twinkling under a sky massed with clouds, pink in the west, fading to rose and violet in the east. The evening star shone clear, hanging low over the Golden Gate Bridge. Eastward the lamps were burning along the gray arches of the Oakland Bridge, a string of amber gems. The bellboy turned on lights, opened closets, and left Willie alone with the sunset and his bags. The new ensign stood by the window for a moment, stroking his gold stripe, and wondering at so much beauty and splendor so far from New York.
“Might as well unpack,” he said to the evening star, and opened his pigskin valise. Most of his belongings were in a wooden crate in the hotel’s check room. In the valise he carried only a few changes of clothes. On top of a layer of white shirts lay two mementos of his last hours in New York-a phonograph record and a letter.
Willie rolled the record between his fingers and wished he had brought his portable phonograph. How perfect a setting the evening was for May’s sweet voice, and the Mozart aria! She had recorded it for him in a Broadway shop one eight when they were both giddy with champagne. Willie smiled as he thought of the delicious April evenings with May during his ten days’ leave. He reached for the telephone, then pulled back his hand, realizing that it was near midnight in the Bronx, when all candy stores were shut and dark. Besides, he reminded himself, he was giving May up, because he couldn’t marry her, and she was too good a girl to be kept dangling. His plan had been to enjoy an ecstatic farewell, then depart and never write or answer letters, allowing the relationship to die peacefully of malnutrition. May hadn’t been informed of the plan. He had fulfilled the first part, now he must remember the second.
He laid aside the record and picked up his father’s mysterious letter. No use holding it to the light, it was bulky and utterly opaque. He shook it, and sniffed it, and wondered for the fortieth time what could possibly be inside.
“When do you think you’ll get to the Caine?” the father had asked, the afternoon before Willie’s departure.
“I don’t know, Dad-in three or four weeks.”
“No more?”
“Maybe six weeks, tops. They move us out pretty fast, I hear.”
Thereupon his father had limped to the desk and drawn the sealed envelope out of a leather portfolio. “When you report aboard the Caine-the day you get there, not before or after, open this and read it.”
“What’s in it?”
“Why, if I wanted you to know now I wouldn’t have gotten myself a writer’s cramp scrawling it, would I?”
“It isn’t money? I won’t need money.”
“No, not money.”
“Sealed orders, eh?”
“Something like that. You’ll do as I say?”
“Of course, Dad.”
“Fine- Put it away and forget about it. Never mind mentioning it to your mother.”
Three thousand miles from his father and the scene of the promise, Willie was tempted to peek at the contents; merely to glance at the first page, no more. He tugged at the flap. It was dry, and came loose easily without tearing. The letter was open for Willie’s inspection.
But the thin strand of honor held, after all, across the continent. Willie licked the crumbled paste on the open flap, sealed the letter tight, and tucked it out of sight at the bottom of the valise. Knowing his own character, he thought it well to minimize the strain on it.
Well, he thought, he would write a letter to May after all-just one. She would expect it. Once he went to sea, silence would be understandable; now it would be cruel, and Willie didn’t want to treat