Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [6]
The new rise in the entertainment world, announced to his family that same evening, was the deathblow to Mrs. Keith’s faltering campaign for Willie’s return to comparative literature. There was, of course, talk of Willie’s enlisting. On the train ride to Manhasset he had caught some of the war fever of the excited commuters, so that his sluggish conscience stirred and gave him a prod. Willie brought up the subject at the end of dinner. “What I really ought to do,” he said, as Mrs. Keith heaped his dessert dish with a second helping of Bavarian cream, “is chuck the piano and comparative literature, and join the Navy. I know I could get a commission.”
Mrs. Keith glanced at her husband. The mild little doctor, whose round face much resembled Willie’s, kept his cigar in his mouth as an excuse to remain silent.
“Don’t be absurd, Willie.” In a lightning estimate Mrs. Keith abandoned the distinguished phantom, Professor Willis Seward Keith, Ph.D. “Just when your career begins to look seriously promising? Obviously I’ve been wrong about you. If you can make such a spectacular rise so quickly, you must be very gifted. I want you to make the most of your talents. I really believe, now, you’re going to be a second Noel Coward.”
“Somebody’s got to fight the war, Mom.”
“Don’t try to be wiser than the Army, my boy. When they need you, they’ll call you.”
Willie said, “What do you think, Dad?”
The plump doctor ran a hand through the remaining strands of his black hair. The cigar emerged from his mouth. “Well, Willie,” he said, in a warm, quiet voice. “I think your mother would be very sorry to see you go.”
So it was that Willie Keith sang and played for the customers of the Club Tahiti from December 1941 to April 1942 while the Japanese conquered the Philippines, and the Prince of Wales and the Repulse sank, and Singapore fell, and the cremation ovens of the Germans consumed men, women, and children at full blast, thousands every day.
In the spring two great events occurred in Willie’s life; he fell in love, and he received a notice from his draft board.
He had already undergone the usual loves of a college boy with spending money. He had flirted with girls of his own class, and pressed matters further with girls of lower station. Three or four times he had considered himself plunged in passion. But the explosion into his life of May Wynn was a wholly different matter.
He arrived at the Tahiti on that slushy, drizzly day to play the piano for auditions of new acts. The Club Tahiti was dreary in all times and weathers, but most so in the afternoons. The gray light came in then through the street door and showed bare spots in the frowzy red velvet hangings of the lobby, and black blobs of chewing gum ground into the blue carpet, and blisters in the orange paint that covered the door and its frame. And the nude girls in the South Seas mural looked peculiarly mottled by reason of spatterings of drink, frescoes of tobacco smoke, and layers of plain grime. Willie loved this place exactly as it was. Looking as it did, and smelling as it did of stale tobacco, liquor, and cheap deodorant perfume, it was his domain of power and achievement.
Two girls were sitting near the piano at the far end of the chilly room. The proprietor, a pale fat man with gray stubbly jowls and a face marked with deep soured lines, leaned on the piano, chewing a half-burned cigar and leafing through a ‘ musical arrangement.
“Okay,