Final Harbor

Chapter 20

Lieut. Comdr. Arthur Hinman’s eyes opened slowly and he rolled his head on the soft pillow, trying to remember where he was. He lay quietly for a moment, thinking. Then he smelled the faint odor of the sea and a harbor mixed with the reek of auto exhaust fumes coming through the opened window and the foreign scent of a woman’s perfume.

San Francisco.

He turned his head and looked at Joan Richards. Her crisp black hair was slightly tousled. Her eyes were closed and her full breasts were rising and falling slowly and evenly under the sheet and light blanket. He studied her face in the morning light. Without make-up her skin was clear with a rosy tint underneath. Her full lips were parted slightly, showing her front teeth. He reached out and very softly touched her hair. Her eyes opened and closed and then opened again and she smiled, a slow, soft smile.

“You’re staring at me,” she said.

“Not staring, adoring,” he said. “Did you know that you have flawless skin? It’s marvelous!”

“Of course.” She covered her mouth with one hand and yawned hugely. “You’ve been telling me for a week that I’m perfect so I guess I am. But is that all you’re going to do, just lie there and stare at me? Does a woman get a cup of coffee in this miserable life or has the war stopped room service and morning coffee?”

“I’ll call right now,” he said, throwing back the covers. He stood up beside the bed and her eyes widened.

“Forget the coffee for a little while! This woman can’t ignore a challenge like that! Get back in here, man!” He looked down at himself and grinned and got back into bed.

“Not heavy, romantic love,” she murmured as she rolled onto her side facing him. “Just fun and games on Saturday morning in old San Francisco, okay?”

“You’re the Captain,” he said, fitting himself to her. “You give the orders and I’ll obey them.”

“Now hear this!” she said. She put a leg across him and reached downward with her hand. “You’ve got the right angle on the bow and the range is right and you can load and fire that torpedo when ready! How’s that? Am I learning your submarine talk?”

“You’re doing fine,” he said. He moved in response to her guiding hand and then moved strongly and smoothly and as she gasped and closed her eyes he put his hand around her buttocks and drew himself deep into her.

Later they lay side by side, her head on his muscled arm.

“It was never like this before,” she said softly. “All week long it’s been so good! So absolutely wonderful!

“Women, girls too, dream, you know. They dream of the man who truly cares about the woman, the man who cares enough to make sure that the woman’s every need is satisfied. But that dream hardly ever comes true. Now it’s come true for me.” She sighed and let her fingers trail across his shoulder. She turned her face to him, her dark blue eyes almost black in the light.

“I want you to believe that, I truly want you to believe it!”

“I do believe,” he said gravely. “Simply because it has been the same for me. In all honesty, it was good before, with Marie.” He said the name of his dead wife with ease. “It was good. But it was different. Not like it is with you. And now it is my turn to tell you something and I ask you to believe me.” He looked at her, his eyes questioning. She nodded.

“I used to lie in my bunk on Mako,” he said, “remembering, after she was gone. I’d remember every detail of how it was with her, every detail. Now I can’t remember those details. It’s all fuzzy. Each day it gets more and more blurred. Now it’s just a warm and pleasant memory, no details at all. That’s because of you and what you mean to me.”

She reached over, squirming, and kissed his stubbled chin.

“That is a very beautiful thing to say to a woman,” she said softly. “It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. But if you don’t get me some coffee I’ll die! And I get to use the shower first!” She got out of bed and went to the door of the bathroom, her firm buttocks jiggling slightly. He put his arm in back of his head and grinned at her as she stopped at the door and looked back.

“You have got the finest ass this side of the Pecos River,” he said lazily. “Now get it in the shower while I call down for coffee. Then we’ll go down below and I’ll feed you.”

“It’s ‘down stairs’ here on land, sailor and I want orange juice, a stack of wheat cakes and a yard of pork sausage and then I’ll be ready to eat breakfast!” She closed the door to the bathroom behind her and he heard the water in the shower begin to drum.

The romance between the two had been slow to start. During the first week of the tour Hinman had resented Joan’s impatient coaching, her criticisms of his diction and delivery. When he would flare up against her criticism she had shrugged, lit a cigaret and changed the subject. When he had cooled down she would begin again, never wavering in her determination to make his delivery natural, his handling of reporters, friendly and hostile, smoother. It was during the second week that he realized that she was a polished professional in her own line and that her advice was sound. He realized as well that she was more than just a woman in a Navy uniform doing a job. He saw in her the deep, bubbling sense of humor that he had seen in Marie, the clear distrust of anything phony or artificial and the obvious zest she had for life itself.

One evening, a few days after he had begun to appreciate Joan Richards for the singular person she was, they dined in his hotel suite after a banquet at which each had only nibbled at the salad. He finished a piece of chocolate cake that was dessert and at the motion of her fork reached over and appropriated her piece of cake. As he ate it he began to talk.

The words poured out of him. He told her about Marie, about his courtship of the tall, angular girl-woman, about their marriage and about her death and the terrible emptiness it had left in him. She listened, speaking only enough to keep his narrative going, filling his coffee cup, lighting a cigaret for him. And then he had stopped, his face stricken. She reached forward and touched his hand.

“Don’t! It was something you had to do sooner or later. I’m glad you did it, I’m glad you told it to me!”

“I don’t know what got into me,” he mumbled.

“You’ve got it backwards,” she said gently. “It was something that was in you already and had to come out. You can’t keep something like that inside you and bottled up forever. It has to come out, one way or another it has to come out and it came out as it was, as something fine and decent and good. You were a very lucky man. She was a lucky woman. You were lucky to have each other.”

“The reminiscing of an old man!” he said in a low voice.

“Old? Thirty-seven is old? You’re young! You’ve got a lifetime ahead of you and it will be a better life now, for you, for those around you who care about you.”

“How do you know?” he stared at her.

“Because I’m a woman, that’s all. Because I think I know how Marie felt about you. And because I think I know that it makes me happy that she was happy and that you were happy.

“Because I know that if you had not found someone to talk to, to tell about the two of you, that what you kept inside of you would eventually change and corrode and when that happened you would begin to change and dry up inside. I don’t want you to change, not a little bit.”

He looked at her, his eyes veiled. “The Chaplain at Pearl is a wise man. He said almost the same thing but he used some different words. You are a wise woman, Joan Richards.”

She smiled and her face was gentle. “If you say so. Me, I think I’m wise enough to leave you now.” She picked up her clipboard and her handbag.

“I’ll put in a call for seven tomorrow morning,” she said. “For both of us. We’ll have an early breakfast and hit the bricks again. Another day, another dollar. We hit two factories tomorrow morning and then a luncheon speech. Do you know that as of the last accounting you’ve raised more money for War Bonds than anyone except Marlene Dietrich? How does that grab you?”

He smiled at her and she left his room, her head high. She did not, he noticed, swing her hips.

The evening talks in his hotel suite became a regular event. Hinman told Joan of his boyhood, his life at the Naval Academy and his fondness for practical jokes and how that fondness had stunted his career until his marriage to Marie, an Admiral’s daughter. He told her about submarines and the men who sailed in them. And he spoke freely about Captain Severn’s scathing denunciation of himself and Mike Brannon. He told her how Ben Butler’s idea about the War Bond tour had saved his career and that of Mike Brannon as well

Joan said little, only enough to keep him talking. When he asked, she told him about Ben Butler, the respect he was given by his peers in the newspaper business for his honesty and his ability. Once, when he asked, she talked briefly about her own brief marriage and why, although her husband was handsome and on his way to success in the advertising field, she had decided that it was better to be out of the marriage and happy than married and unhappy.

The lid blew off in Los Angeles. The day’s schedule had been crowded; a breakfast for a group of businessmen and a short speech, a tour of a war plant and a short speech and then a luncheon in front of a Rotary group, two afternoon appearances before women’s groups and a formal dinner hosted by the Mayor in the evening.

Joan nudged Hinman on the arm as they walked across the hotel lobby to the ballroom where the dinner was to be held.

“You’re edgy, boss,” she said quietly. “It’s been a heavy day, too heavy. Calm down and take it very easy.” He nodded.

The press hadn’t been around during the daytime appearances but they were out in force for the Mayor’s dinner, which the City Council was co-hosting. By this time, three weeks into the War Bond tour, every newspaper had a fat envelope on Lieut. Comdr. Arthur Hinman, U.S.N. and what he had said in a score of speeches and press conferences. Now the task that faced the press was to get Hinman to say something new or at worst, say what he had been saying in a different form so it would read like news, to come up with new questions that would draw answers that would make good copy.

Hinman, carefully briefed by Joan Richards, tried to cooperate, to vary his answers to the stock questions and to parry the pointed questions of those reporters whose publishers were strongly opposed to President Roosevelt’s international policies and the entry of the United States into the war.

One of those reporters, a lean man with a sharp nose and an irritating voice, went after Hinman in the question-and-answer section that had become a feature of his luncheon and dinner appearances. The reporter’s nagging questions and his caustic references to the low intelligence level of anyone who would be “deceived” about President Roosevelt’s “real reasons” for the American entry into the war had finally broken through Hinman’s composure.

Hinman gripped the edge of the lectern with his hard hands and looked out over the dinner audience for a long moment, his face grim. Then he looked straight at the reporter.

“Sir,” he began in a quiet voice. “I am getting damned sick and tired of you people who keep saying that I am a fool for fighting President Roosevelt’s war! I am damned sick and tired of it! And I am damned sick of you and everyone like you!

“If you think the other side is so great why in the hell aren’t you over there on that side? I happen to believe that if the other side wins we will lose every freedom we have and I am not going to let that happen as long as I am alive, not to me and by God, not to you!”

The man waved his pencil and started to reply but Hinman cut him off with a raised hand and the harsh ring of command in his voice.

“No, I will not let you speak, sir! I did you the courtesy of hearing you out and you do me the same courtesy!” He pointed his finger at the reporter.

“If you really think that this war we are in is not our war then, damn you, go out to Pearl Harbor and look at the remains of the United States Navy! There are more than two thousand dead men under the water of that harbor! Men who died without a decent chance to defend themselves! Men who were killed in a sneak attack that was timed,” his voice rose, “a sneak attack timed to catch those men as they were on their way to church service!” He leaned over the lectern, his eyes boring into the reporter’s eyes.

“My wife, God rest her soul, was on her way to church, to the chapel at Hickam Air Base in Pearl Harbor.

“She was in a car with the wives of two other officers. A Japanese pilot with a wealth of military targets in the harbor and on the Base machine-gunned that car with three women in it! He caught them fifty yards from the church!

“I don’t want your wife or anyone here to die like that! And I won’t let it happen as long as there is blood in my body, as long as the citizens — I said citizens, mister — as long as the citizens of this country give us the weapons we need to fight this ‘someone else’s war’ you talk about! And if you don’t like my attitude or what I say, mister, I’ll go out in the alley with you right now and you can do your damndest to change it!”

For a long moment there was a dead silence in the hall and then the diners surged to their feet applauding, stamping their feet. A reporter for The New York Times sighed and looked at a reporter for the Chicago Daily News.

“I think The New York Times is entitled to make an editorial comment for all of us,” he said. In full view of the diners and the speaker’s table he walked over to the reporter Hinman had blasted and politely turned him half-way around and then kicked him as hard as he could. The audience began to laugh and applaud and Joan Richards nudged Hinman.

“Make your regrets to the Mayor and let’s get the hell out of here,” she whispered. He nodded and said a few words to the Mayor, who clapped him on the back and started for the door. A radio reporter with a microphone stopped Hinman and Joan Richards.

“I have Captain Hinman right here, folks. You just heard him on this network. Captain, will you say a few words?”

Joan pulled on his arm but he stopped and bent to the microphone the man held up to his face.

“I would be happy to do that, sir,” he said slowly. “If I offended any of your audience with my sea-going language, I apologize. I do not apologize for what I said. I think it’s time someone stood up and said it. We are in a terrible, a bitter, vicious war with an implacable and determined enemy. We are going to win this war come what may and when we do I hope it will be the start of peace for generations to come. Thank you.”

“That was an exclusive statement from Captain Hinman, the submarine hero of the Navy, ladies and gentlemen, an exclusive report on this network….” the radio reporter was still babbling into his microphone as Hinman and Joan left by a side door.

An hour later, sitting in his hotel suite with his tie off and his shirt undone at the neck, Hinman looked at Joan.

“Well, lady, I guess I blew it! You might have to cancel the whole last week of this tour.”

“You don’t know very much about public relations, do you?” she said. “By noon tomorrow I’ll have at least a hundred requests for a speech by you!

“You were great! Absolutely great! And for your information, by tomorrow morning there will be pictures and a front-page story in every newspaper in the country! No, don’t get angry at me, I don’t mean that what you did was good because the story will get a big play.

“I mean that what you did was good because it was time someone told off those creeps! And about two thousand people sitting there listening and watching you do it approved. Didn’t you see them stand up, didn’t you hear them applaud? Didn’t you see Joe Edson of The New York Times walk over and kick that bastard square in his ass?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. You may be right. But I think now that I should have kept my head. I should have kept my answer impersonal, not dragged in that stuff about Marie and the other two women and the church.”

“Who has a better right?” she said softly. He nodded and stood up.

“Joan, lady, I think I’ll hit the sack. I want to think about tonight, about a better way to handle those bastards.”

She rose. “May I use your bathroom?” Without waiting for his assent she went in the bathroom and closed the door. She came out five minutes later dressed in a sheer nightgown that ended half-way between her hips and her knees.

Hinman’s eyes widened as he saw the roseate nipples of her full breasts through the sheer material, the bold triangle of black pubic hair, the slim legs and bare feet. He drew a long, shaky breath.

“Do you always carry your nightgown in your handbag?”

“It’s a habit I started four days ago,” she said calmly. “Nightgown and toothbrush. I told you and Ben Butler in Washington that I thought a woman had the right to ask to be loved by a man. This is how I choose to ask. Now give me your answer.”

“I don’t have the words,” he said simply. He held out his arms and she moved into them with a fluid motion, pressing herself against him, holding him tighter as she sensed and then felt his arousal. They clung together, his face in her crisp black curls, nuzzling her ear and neck, feeling the heat of her body, smelling the womanly aroma of her arousal. He slid his hand down her smooth back and she gently separated herself from him and walked over to the bed and got in and smiled at him.