Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [5]
Back in their room, with leisure to talk, the three exchanged identities. The gloomy Edwin Keggs was a high-school algebra teacher from Akron, Ohio. Roland Keefer was the son of a West Virginian politician. He had had a job in the state personnel bureau, but, as he cheerfully phrased it, he didn’t know personnel from Shinola, and had simply been learning the ropes around the capitol when the war came. Willie’s announcement that he was a night-club pianist sobered the other two, and the conversation lagged. Then he added that he was a Princeton graduate, and a chill silence blanketed the room.
When the bugle sounded retreat and Willie climbed into bed, it occurred to him that he had not had a single thought of May Wynn or of his parents all day. It seemed weeks since he had kissed his mother that same morning on 116th Street. He was not far, physically, from Manhasset, no further than he had been in his Broadway haunts. But he felt arctically remote. He glanced around at the tiny room, the bare yellow-painted walls bordered in black wood, the shelves heavy with menacing books, the two strangers in underwear climbing into their cots, sharing an intimacy with him that Willie had never known even in his own family. He experienced a most curiously mixed feeling of adventurous coziness, as though he were tented down for the night in the wilds, and sharp regret for his lost freedom.
CHAPTER 2
May Wynn
Having one of the highest draft numbers in the land, Willie had passed the first war year peacefully without taking refuge in the Navy.
There had been some talk of his returning to Princeton after graduation for a master’s degree in literature, the first step toward a teaching career. But in September following a summer of tennis and multiple romances at his grandparents’ home in Rhode Island, Willie had found a job in a cocktail lounge of a minor New York hotel, playing the piano and singing his original ditties. The first earned dollar has remarkable weight in deciding a career. Willie elected art. He was not paid much. The fee was, in fact, the smallest permitted by the musicians’ union for a piano player. Willie didn’t really care, so long as fifty-dollar bills flowed from his mother. As the proprietor, a swarthy, wrinkled Greek, pointed out, Willie was gaining professional experience.
His songs were of the order known as cute, rather than witty or tuneful. His major piece, sung only for the larger crowds, was If You Knew What the Gnu Knew, a comparison of the love-making ways of animals and humans. The rest of his works leaned heavily on such devices as rhyming “plastered” and “bastard,” and “twitches” and “bitches”-but instead of saying the off-color word, Willie would smile at his audience and substitute a harmless one that didn’t rhyme. This usually provoked happy squeals from the kind of audiences that collected in the cocktail lounge. Willie’s close-trimmed Princetonian haircut, his expensive clothes, and his childlike sweetness of face served to dress up his slender talent. He usually appeared in fawn-colored slacks, a tan-and-green tweed jacket, heavy English cordovan shoes, tan-and-green Argyle socks, and a white shirt with a tie knotted in the latest knot. Considering the entertainment merely pictorially, the Greek had a bargain in Willie.
A couple of months later the proprietor of a very dingy night club on Fifty-second Street, the Club Tahiti, saw his act and bought him away from the Greek with a raise of ten dollars a week. This transaction was concluded in an afternoon interview at the Club Tahiti, a dank cellar full of papier-mâché palms, dusty coconuts, and upended chairs on tables. The date was December 7, 1941.
Willie emerged from this meeting into the sunny street full of exultation and pride. He had risen above the minimum union wage. It seemed to him that he had overtaken Cole Porter, and was well on the