Pacific Glory

EIGHTEEN

After a long and bumpy flight from Guam to Honolulu via Wake Island, Marsh was assigned to a rehab center on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. There he spent a day learning how to use a wheelchair by himself and was measured for some temporary prosthetic devices. These would be produced back in the States and sent out to Pearl, after which he would come back to the rehab center for more training. The next day he had to go through the sadly familiar routine of reacquiring personal effects, beginning with clothes that could accommodate his injuries. That meant long-sleeved khaki shirts to hide the arm stump and some khaki trousers altered to cover up the leg stump. The ships-service sales store was kind enough to sell him a couple of left shoes. Apparently that wasn’t a unique request.

Once again he had to reconstitute his service, pay, and medical records. These all existed in permanent form back in Washington somewhere, but he needed local records to get things like a new ID card, a BOQ room, and a ration book. Naturally there was no single office on the base that could do all these things, so he spent a lot of time on shuttle buses, being helped on and off by willing sailors.

He was acutely aware of the fact that he had avoided calling Glory. If asked, he could have provided several excuses: He was very busy. He was in rehab. He’d lost enough parts to make him feel like less of a man. More importantly, if he went to see Glory, he’d have to tell Sally, and that would break her heart. Breaking Sally’s heart was not an option.

Each night, however, he thought about it. Then he thought about how the light in Sally’s eyes could be dimmed by just the suggestion that he was still interested in how Glory was doing. Sally was his future. Glory was, well, what? Tommy’s widow, Beast’s one-night stand?

No, that was too harsh. Glory was an intelligent and gorgeous woman. Just not in his league, at all. A future with her was a figment of his imagination, if he was to be truthful to himself. He wasn’t in Sally’s league, either, but she loved him and he loved her. That’s all that mattered. The war would end some day, and he wanted to both survive it and spend the future with Sally.

So: Don’t call. It was as simple as that.

Right.

On his third day back at Pearl he received a call to report to the admin officer at base headquarters. He wheeled himself with his one good arm down the main hallway in a series of interrupted right turns and into the administrative office, where he was asked to wait. By then he was fully qualified to wait. His brand-new khakis felt stiff and itchy, and his missing right foot ached, as usual. Then he was surprised when the admin officer’s batwing doors bumped open to reveal a commander in his own wheelchair. He saw Marsh and rolled his way over in his direction.

“Welcome aboard, Mister Vincent,” he said. “In case they didn’t tell you, you’re my new assistant admin-O. I’m Hugo Oxerhaus.”

“Commander, pleased to meet you, and, no, they didn’t tell me.”

“For what it’s worth, you are now officially part of ‘they,’” he said. Then he grinned. “And you’re out of uniform, by the way.”

“I am?” Marsh said. He immediately felt his shirt collars to see if he’d forgotten to put on his gold oak leaves.

“You definitely are,” he replied. “Come with me, please, and we’ll rectify that.”

He spun his chair around with more ease than Marsh could manage — he still had both hands. He had two legs, too, but they didn’t seem to move at all. It took Marsh a minute to get his own chair turned around, and one of the yeomen asked if he needed a hand.

“I need an arm if you’ve got one lying around,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ve got to learn how to manage this. Thanks anyway.”

He followed Oxerhaus down the hallway toward the front of the building, where they entered the naval base commander’s office suite. Two pretty female yeomen stood up when they wheeled in. One went into the admiral’s office through yet another set of batwing doors. A moment later she reappeared and ushered them in to meet the base commander, a rear admiral. He welcomed Marsh aboard and then picked up a piece of paper from his desk.

“Got something for you, Commander,” he said. Marsh thought he was talking to Oxerhaus, but the admiral was looking at him. Then he read out a promotion order that apparently had Marsh’s name on it. Oxerhaus produced a small box of silver oak leaves, and the admiral pinned them onto Marsh’s shirt collar.

“Congratulations, Commander Vincent,” he said.

“I don’t know what to say, sir,” Marsh said. “I thought the next official letter I’d get would be from a Court of Inquiry.”

The admiral smiled. “That’s been concluded, at least for the moment,” he said. “You’re a surviving commanding officer of one of the destroyers who went up against Jap battlewagons off Samar. If anything, you’re something of a celebrity up at PacFleet. One of these days you’re going to get to meet Admiral Nimitz.”

“I’d be honored to meet Admiral Nimitz,” Marsh said.

“Most people are,” the admiral replied. “He’s quite something in person. Anyway, you’ll be assigned here for a while until the Navy decides what to do with you.”

“I assumed medical retirement.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Do you have somewhere to go urgently?”

“No, sir, unless you’ve got a seagoing XO job that needs filling.”

He smiled. “I suspect the Bureau of Navigation will come up with something useful for you to do. In the meantime, this war is far from over.”

“Don’t I know it,” Marsh said, not meaning to be funny. Oxerhaus and the admiral both laughed, and finally he did, too.

Oxerhaus rolled back to his office with Marsh in tow. He described Marsh’s duties, which didn’t sound a whole lot different from when he’d been an XO aboard ship. The whole idea of being promoted to full commander hadn’t sunk in yet. He was still looking over his shoulder for some grim-faced captain to summon him in front of a board or a court of some kind for “losing” Evans. Commander Oxerhaus assured him that he would not be stuck doing make-work. The naval base at Pearl had become the collecting point for most of the Pacific Navy’s wounded, creating a veritable mountain of paperwork, Marsh’s included.

“At least I won’t make you push my chair around like I did to one of your predecessors, that McCarty fella.”

“Mick McCarty?” Marsh asked. “He’s a classmate. In fact, he was at Leyte in one of the jeeps.”

“Really,” Oxerhaus said, frowning. “Every class has its share of jerks. I’ve had an informal query in to the Bureau of Personnel now for a month trying to locate him. Which ship?”

“Madison Bay. Actually, she was sunk, but I believe they got all their aircraft off before she went down. There’s a possibility that he was shot down that day, but he’s probably on one of the Taffys out there.”

“What’s a Taffy?” he asked, and Marsh explained the call signs of the escort carrier task groups. Then he asked why Oxerhaus needed to get hold of Beast.

“It involves one of the Navy nurses over at Hospital Point,” he said.

It was Marsh’s turn to take a breath. “Which nurse?” he asked. “Is her name Lewis?”

That surprised Oxerhaus. “Yes, it is. You know her?”

“Very well,” Marsh said. “What’s happened?”

Oxerhaus blew out a long breath and then suggested they go for a roll. It took Marsh a minute to figure that out, but then he did, and they went outside the building and into the morning sunlight. Marsh was a little surprised that two commanders in wheelchairs didn’t seem to attract any special attention, but Pearl was full of wounded men.

“Ensign Lewis disappeared one night about three weeks ago,” he said. “Nobody saw her go, and she didn’t talk to anyone about going anywhere. She simply disappeared.”

Marsh’s blood ran cold. “Was there an investigation?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Oxerhaus said. “We got the CID branch of the HASP into it right away; she was supposedly a beautiful woman, and everyone was thinking some kind of assault. Plus, there were special circumstances.”

“Her recent pregnancy.”

Again Marsh had surprised his new boss. He explained how he knew about that.

“Okay,” Oxerhaus said. “I personally spoke to her supervisor at the hospital, a Lieutenant Somebody. She said she’d seen some signs of postpartum depression but nothing she would call out of the ordinary. Apparently all women go through it after having a baby.”

Marsh had never heard of postpartum anything, but he accepted the conventional wisdom. “Her best buddy at the hospital was Ensign Adkins,” Marsh said. “She was sent out to Guam to stand up the new hospital out there. That’s where I ended up after Leyte, and she told me she hadn’t heard from Ensign Lewis for some time.”

“Well, the HASP came up empty-handed. They coordinated with the Honolulu police, but they usually don’t get involved in military cases. Said they’d check their informants, see if anyone had heard about a haole being abducted or anything, but nothing came back.”

“My God,” Marsh said. “This is such a small place. How could she simply disappear?”

“Was she a swimmer, do you know?”

“She was not,” Marsh said. “Avoided deep water entirely.”

“We lose a surprising number of people to the sea around here,” Oxerhaus said. “People forget that Oahu’s a volcanic mountain, sticking up out of twelve thousand feet of water. Some of the beaches are superfine black volcanic sand. Underwater it acts like quicksand. Your feet get stuck, then your legs, then a big wave comes in and you can’t move, so you drown. We warn everybody, put signs on the beach, but many don’t pay any attention. All they want to do is go to the beach, drink beer, and meet women.”

“She would not have gone into any kind of surf.”

“Was she involved with anyone, romantically?”

Marsh elected to keep Glory’s connection to Mick out of the conversation. If he even mentioned Mick, Oxerhaus would make him suspect number one. He also knew that there was no way Mick could have been involved in Glory’s disappearance. Besides, he was pretty sure now that had been Mick’s Dauntless diving into that Jap cruiser. “Must have been, at least once” was all he could manage.

“Yeah, right,” Oxerhaus nodded. “At least once. The other nurses mentioned McCarty as a possible, but he’d left Pearl long before this happened. Which was too bad, because he’d make a great suspect.”

Suspicions confirmed, Marsh thought. “Why?”

“Your classmate, McCarty, was a big-time drunk. Started a fight with the HASP, with predictable results. He was miraculously the sole survivor off a med flight that ditched near Guadalcanal, and, speaking from personal experience, he pulled some seriously dangerous stunts back when I was air boss in Yorktown. I had him in hack at the BOQ after the HASP incident, and, frankly, I was looking for a way to yank his wings. Found out that, these days, anyway, a bar brawl with the shore patrol won’t get you kicked out of naval aviation.”

Marsh just shook his head and didn’t say anything. They went back into the office, where Oxerhaus had a yeoman show Marsh to his first in-box.

That night Marsh had dinner at the O-club for the first time since his last visit to Pearl. It hadn’t changed much, except to become if anything even more crowded. The new hostess, a gorgeous young thing arrayed in Hawaiian costume, took Marsh back to a corner of the main dining room that he later learned was called Crip’s Corner. The tables had been modified for wheelchairs, and there were four other officers in chairs already there. They’d been drinking awhile, based on the elevated noise level at their end of the table.

As a waiter rolled Marsh into an empty slot, he realized he was the senior officer there; the rest of them were lieutenants. The one seated next to him had lost his entire right leg at the hip, which might or might not have accounted for his unsteady condition. He was staring at Marsh’s shiny new silver oak leaves and shaking his head. Marsh obviously looked too young to him to be a three-striper.

“A commander?” he began, slurring his syllables just a bit. The man next to him nudged him in the ribs, and the guy blinked, burped, and then closed his eyes.

“Sorry, sir,” the other lieutenant said. “Harry’s got kind of a load on.”

“No problem,” Marsh said. “Where you guys from?”

They were all aviators, including Sleeping Beauty. They told Marsh that Harry had brought his fighter back aboard his carrier, caught a wire, stopped, slid back his canopy, ducked down into the cockpit, and then thrown the remains of his leg onto the flight deck and asked for a medic before passing out. Harry was now, of course, rapidly passing into naval aviation legend.

The waiter brought Marsh a Scotch and a menu. One of the lieutenants worked up the nerve to ask what had happened to him. Marsh told them he’d lost an expensive sea-fight against a Jap battleship. “Expensive?” the young man asked. “Cost me an arm and a leg, didn’t it?” Marsh replied. They laughed and promptly went back to drinking, probably thinking that Marsh was lying, nuts, or both. Harry continued his nap, which Marsh thought was probably a good thing.

As Marsh sipped his Scotch, he tried to get his mind around the idea of Glory disappearing. He simply couldn’t comprehend it. He kept running through scenarios that could explain it. She’d been abducted, raped, strangled, and thrown into the sea. She’d gone into the city and stolen back her baby and was hiding out in the countryside somewhere with a Hawaiian family. She’d become fed up with all the backbiting about her unwed-mother status and stowed away on a troop transport or hospital ship headed stateside.

None of his theories seemed likely. As a commissioned officer who’d gotten herself knocked up, to put it in the vernacular, she must have been pretty humiliated. On the other hand, she’d had the personal courage to see the thing through. As an experienced operating room nurse, getting rid of her “problem” would not have been that difficult. Instead, according to Sally, she’d put her head down, ignored all the smug looks and snippy comments, and gone back to work. That was not the course of someone who would run away from Pearl.

Could she have committed suicide? That was always possible, but usually there was a note and a body. She’d been pining for her husband ever since December 1941, with her loss compounded by the fact that Tommy was entombed in a burned-out hulk no more than a half mile from where she worked and walked, every single day. If she could handle that, plus the enormous strains of a frontline wartime hospital, she was not a likely candidate for suicide.

So what the hell had happened?

He decided that for as long as he was stashed here in Pearl, he’d make it his mission to find out. Somebody over there in the nurses’ quarters had to know something. In the meantime, he had to tell Sally. All things considered, he’d liked her recent surprise a lot better than the one he was going to drop on her.

For the next month he settled into the work of routine in the base headquarters, pushing more paper than he thought even existed. Oxerhaus had a formidable reputation in the headquarters building for an unstable temperament, but Marsh thought the fact that they were both wheelchair-bound kept his bile pointed elsewhere. He became more proficient at doing just about everything with one hand and one leg, including the basics of personal hygiene, printing legibly with his left hand, getting in and out of buildings that were never built with wheelchairs in mind, and gritting his way through the travail of a rehab program that was supposed to prepare him for the attachment of his prostheses. He never did get to go meet Admiral Nimitz, though.

In his spare time, he obtained a copy of the HASP investigation on Glory’s disappearance and pored over their interview reports in the evenings. They’d done what looked like a thorough job, talking to everyone with whom Glory had come in contact, both on the base and even at the convent. They’d visually confirmed that her baby, who was still at the convent nursery, had not been kidnapped by his distraught mother. The conclusions section was succinct in the extreme: The case officially remained open. Given the fact that literally thousands of personnel were flowing through Hawaii on their way west, with a considerable number of them getting in some kind of shore patrol trouble downtown, “open” was tantamount to “closed.”

Sally wrote constantly, especially after Marsh told her about Glory’s vanishing act. She was working on getting a transfer back to the hospital at Pearl so that they could be together, and he was hoping that she succeeded. On those nights when his stumps hurt and his future looked increasingly bleak, he often worried that Sally might back out of their budding romance in favor of another guy with all his pins still in place. When he listened to the other crips at the O-club, the Dear Johns were a frequent subject of conversation. At one point he talked himself into a guessing game: Was she still giving him the time of day simply out of sympathy or loyalty? Was he reading too much into their relationship, which, after all, was based more on letters than weeks of personal contact? Should he broach these thoughts in his letters to her?

Fortunately he kept in mind that old saw from the academy’s little plebe-year book containing the so-called Laws of the Navy, and one rule in particular: They prosper who burn in the morning those letters they wrote overnight. Everything looked better against the backdrop of a Hawaiian sunrise and the first cup of Navy office coffee. Even Oxerhaus was reasonably nice for that first hour in the office until something set him off. It didn’t take much, Marsh discovered.

One Monday the something was a report of the casualty lists from the Samar engagement. Under the Madison Bay’s embarked aviation squadron report was the name of Mick McCarty, who was now officially listed as missing in action. Marsh was taken aback when he showed the lists to Oxerhaus. He’d expected an oh-well-, too-bad reaction. Instead Oxerhaus fulminated about not getting another chance to chew Mick’s ass for something.

“He’s listed as MIA,” Marsh reminded him. “More than one MIA has popped back up when the paperwork got straightened out.”

“Knowing him, he’s on some island out there lollygagging with the bare-breasted natives,” Oxerhaus grumped. “Find out who the skipper was of VC-Eleven; get official confirmation that professional fuckup isn’t just laying low.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Marsh followed up on that order the next week. It turned out that the skipper of Composite Eleven was right there in Pearl, the newest orphan in the Aviation Motor Pool, awaiting orders to take what remained of his people on board a new CVE that was coming through Pearl in three weeks. Marsh invited him to come to the base headquarters building for a meeting. That afternoon, a yeoman stuck his head into his office and said there was a Commander Campofino to see him.

“Max Campofino,” the commander said as he came through the batwing doors. Marsh recognized him as one of Navy’s better-known varsity football players back in 1932. He introduced himself, and they did the usual do-you-know drill common to Naval Academy graduates.

Campofino confirmed that Mick had gone up with two nuggets, who’d quickly used up all their ammo, such as it was. Mick had detached them to fly to the Army airfield on Leyte to rearm. The last they saw of him, he was headed back to harass the Japs.

“Harass?”

“You gotta understand, Marsh, we were goin’ up there with fifty-cals, trench-busters, eggs and potatoes. None of the ordnance Mother Madison was carrying would do much against a battleship, and, believe me, we had zero time to upload what they did carry. There were Jap cruisers punchin’ holes right through her as we launched.”

“And Mick never came back?”

“Nope. I landed on one of the Taffy One jeeps, rearmed, went back out, and then it was all over. Japs turned tail for Bernardino Strait. I spent the next five days trying to gather in all my chickens. Fifteen guys made it off the ship. I got nine back.”

“Did all the squadrons experience such losses?”

“More than we would have expected, but, again, you gotta remember, we had lots of nuggets, guys who’d never been up against much more than Jap snipers in trees. A heavy cruiser throwin’ directed ack-ack is something else again, especially when some of the guys were making fake bombing runs with empty racks. It was more than surreal. You should have seen it.”

“Actually, I did,” Marsh said.

“Yeah? You were there? At Leyte?” Then he registered that Marsh was in a chair.

“That’s how I ended up short a wing and a wheel,” Marsh said. “I was skipper of Evans.”

“Holy shit, really? You were there.”

“And then we weren’t,” Marsh said with a grin. “Pissing off a pair of battleships will do that.”

Max sat back in his chair. “God damn,” he said. “We heard about the tin cans getting between the jeeps and the Japs, and how none of ’em came back. One of our guys told of seeing a tin can almost alongside one of the Jap heavies, blasting away while that big bastard tried to get away from him. Said they were pointing main battery at the destroyer, but she was too close.”

“That was us,” Marsh said. “I put us alongside because then the cruisers couldn’t fire at us without hitting their flagship. That was the theory, at least. Didn’t last long, but we were pretty much done by then anyway.”

Max nodded, but his eyes were far away, remembering the chaos of that morning. Marsh recognized that look.

“Tell me something,” Marsh said. “I saw a Dauntless crash into a heavy cruiser, just before the Kongo put us down for the count. Hit her amidships, and then there was a really big blast. Any chance that could have been Mick?”

“I heard that story,” Max said. “That one of our planes did a suicide attack. I didn’t believe it, mostly because I can’t imagine doing such a thing. If I could fly it, I could ditch it.”

“Maybe he couldn’t,” Marsh said. “I only had a few seconds to see it, but he didn’t seem to be flying very well, like maybe he was wounded.”

“Plane smoking? On fire?”

Marsh closed his eyes, trying to recapture the image. “No, he wasn’t on fire, but there were streams of smoke,” he said. “He was sluggish, like he was really working to get that plane to maneuver. Like everything was taking too long.”

“Sounds like a guy who looked down after getting hit and found his guts in his lap. They say that when it’s really, really bad, the body doesn’t feel it for a minute or two. But the brain knows.”

“I wonder,” Marsh said.

“Coulda been,” Max said. “Sounds like something Mick might do, if he thought he was gonna buy the farm. Funny thing is, the Japs did just that the very next day. Some Jap pilot came in on the St. Lo and blew her in half in what everybody who saw it agreed had to be a deliberate suicide attack. The difference is that he apparently came out intending to do that, based on the scuttlebutt. He didn’t make any other bombing or torpedo runs, just appeared out of nowhere, nosed over, and took himself and his bomb through the flight deck and into the hangar bay. Big ball of fire, and she was gone.”

Marsh nodded absently. Now it was his turn to be back there, watching fourteen-inch shells come through the tin-clad sides of the bridge to impale his watch standers on the edges of the hole.

“Marsh?”

He snapped back. “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes…”

“I understand. Truth is, I didn’t know that any of the tin can guys made it back. Word was they all went to Davy Jones.”

“A reasonable assumption,” Marsh said. “At times I was more than ready.”

Max nodded and stood up. “I’ll ask around, see if anybody actually saw that guy dive in on purpose. Right now, it’s rumor, but I’ll shake some rumor trees, see what I can find out.”

“One last question: Did Mick have something painted on the side of his plane? Something white?”

“Yeah, he did. He said he was naval aviation’s version of the Lone Ranger, so he had one’a the shirts paint a white horse on the fuselage. Why?”

“The guy who flew into the Jap cruiser had something white, besides the star, on his side. I couldn’t see what it was, other than it was white.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Maybe you just answered your own question, and some of mine, too.”

“Would you check anyway?” Marsh asked. “I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“I’d appreciate it,” Marsh said and offered his left hand.

“You’re class of ’thirty-two and a commander already? Somebody thinks highly of you.”

“I’m not sure why,” Marsh said. “I keep waiting for a summons to a court of some kind. The funny thing is, Evans wasn’t even my ship, really — I was just the acting CO until a new skipper got out there.”

“Class act,” Max said. “Honored to meet you, Skipper.”

That evening Marsh wheeled himself out to the Hospital Point seawall from his BOQ room. It was another depressingly perfect Hawaiian sunset. He saw some nurses out behind the quarters but decided he wanted to be alone this evening. He went to the channel seawall at the end of the street where the nurses’ quarters were located and set the brakes on the chair. There were more lights on in Pearl Harbor these days, reflecting the fact that the Allies were now bringing the war to the doorstep of the Japanese Home Islands. Streetlights were back on over on Ford Island, and the major base buildings were no longer blacked out. It was all very different from those dark days of early 1942 when he’d come through on Winston and everybody was searching the skies for round two and the beaches for signs of the expected invasion. He automatically looked for the Arizona, but now she lay invisible in the sparkling harbor waters, with only the top of one barbette and two lonely buoys marking her resting place.

He’d received a letter today from Sally saying that she was wrangling a leave back here to Pearl and still working on a permanent transfer. He’d not been surprised how happy that news had made him. He missed her very much and was finally accepting the fact that they’d managed to fall in love. That didn’t dampen his determination to find out what had happened to Glory Lewis, but he knew he would have to tread carefully to make sure Sally didn’t misinterpret that determination. He’d already made inquiries at the Hickam air base, reviewing passenger manifests for her name. He’d actually gone downtown to HASP headquarters to talk to their detectives. It wasn’t that they didn’t care — they did. Absent any evidence of foul play or knowledge of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her or abduct her, they simply had nothing to go on. She was there one day, gone the next. Many of the possibilities Marsh had been checking were already documented in their records of the case.

The lead detective was a local, as people born and raised on the island were called by the occupying military people. He was a giant Samoan who looked like Marsh’s idea of a Japanese sumo wrestler. They’d had to put two desks together for him to be able to put both arms on the top. He’d introduced himself as George Kamehaohno; he told Marsh to call him Kam.

“Me, I’m thinkin’ she’s in the water,” he said, closing the record binder. The word “water” came out as “wadduh.” “People disappear like that here on the island, no jealous husband or boyfriend, no big money trouble? Usually the sea has ’em.”

“But why no body?” Marsh asked and then remembered the obvious answer. Sharks. He didn’t even have to say it. He nodded, having answered his own question.

“You gonna keep lookin’?” Kam asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Go talk to alla those women at the hospital, then. Women know things. Sometimes they know things they don’t know they know. And they’re all Navy people. Maybe don’t wanna talk to the HASP, see?”

“Good idea,” Marsh said and went back to the base.

The problem wasn’t that the nurses had been unwilling to talk to the HASP. The real problem was that none of them assigned there now knew Glory all that well. Most of the first wave of nurses had been shipped out to the western Pacific. Even so, he took to wheeling himself along the channel seawall in the evening with a glass of Scotch planted in a makeshift cup holder taped to his wheelchair. There were usually nurses out there every evening enjoying the breeze and getting the smell of a day’s bloody work in the hospital out of their hair. They all looked so very young, even though he was perhaps not much more than twelve years their senior — in age. Most of them immediately retreated behind wide-eyed yes-sirs and no-sirs once they found out he was a commander. Whatever their experience in nursing, they were all ensigns, and full commanders were really important people. If they only knew, Marsh thought.

They’d heard about Glory’s disappearance, and a very few knew about the pregnancy. None of them had any ideas on what might have happened, but the unspoken consensus was, surprisingly, that it had something to do with her having been an unwed mother. Marsh had to restrain himself from asking if they’d ever seen her wearing a scarlet letter on her uniform. He’d chat with them for a little while, enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke, and then wheel himself down to the point to think about both Glory and Sally.

One night a voice interrupted his reverie. “Boat ride? Boss wanna boat ride?”

Marsh couldn’t find the source of the voice until a head popped up over the lip of the seawall. “Boat ride?” the man asked again, and then he saw the wheelchair. “Oh — oh, sorry, no can do, bro.”

The man was a local, dressed in a faded Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. His boat looked like an overgrown sampan, complete with a badly rusted engine clamped to the transom.

“Boat ride?” Marsh said. “Where to?”

“Harbor side,” he said. “Very pretty. Go see lotsa stuff. Five dollah, or you gimme cigarettes.” Then he frowned, staring at the wheelchair again. “You can walk? Stand up to get in?”

“Afraid not,” Marsh said. “Can’t swim so good, either. The Navy lets you do this?”

He shrugged. “Navy fellas no care, long as we stay away from big kapu ship.”

Kapu. That was the only Hawaiian word Marsh knew besides aloha. Americans would have said taboo. He had to be talking about the Arizona. Marsh asked him why that wreck was kapu.

“Ghosts,” he said. “Lotsa gottem ghosts. You go too close, they get you, pull you down inside. You die then. Big kapu.”

“That makes sense,” Marsh said, fully believing that the wreck would be haunted, what with over a thousand still inside her.

“Well, I wish I could go with you,” he said, “but…” He pointed at his leg and a half and shrugged.

“You got cigarette?” the boatman asked.

Marsh had been carrying cigarettes to use as an icebreaker when he rolled up, since most of the nurses smoked. He gave one to the boatman and lit it for him. The man smelled faintly of fish and charcoal. He thanked Marsh and sat back down in his little boat. “I go get Navy nurse,” he said. “They like go boat ride. Lotsa Navy people go boat ride. See the lights?”

Marsh looked out over the harbor, and in fact he could see the dim stern lights on some small boats.

“The nurses are back over there,” Marsh said, pointing over his shoulder at the seawall area behind the quarters. “They’ve got cigarettes, too.”

A question occurred to him as the little man began to push the boat away from the seawall. “You say lots of nurses go boat ride with you?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We go ’em alla time. Alla Navy ladies wanna see da big kapu, but we no go dere. We go see da oddah one, backside Ford Island. Dey call it Oo-tah. No kapu dere. Not like Ah-zona. One Aiea guy, he go Ah-zona one night? Said crazy haole woman make him go. Plenty ghost come for him, but he get away. Next day, da guy? He break both da legs. Ah-zona big kapu. Bad kapu.”

He waved and backed the boat around the corner of the seawall and went down to see if he could scare up some able-bodied passengers. Marsh finished his Scotch and started back to the BOQ. Halfway there, he stopped.

Crazy haole woman made him go? To the Arizona?

He wheeled the chair around to go see if he could find the boatman, but it was now full dark. He wanted the name of “da guy” who took a crazy white woman out to the Arizona. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened out there, but a little voice in his head told him he’d maybe solved the mystery. Especially when the boatman had called the woman crazy.

He realized he needed some local help. Big Kam came to mind.

Three days later the big Samoan appeared in Marsh’s office in his HASP uniform. Beside him was a very frightened local, a scrawny old man who looked like a stick-figure doll next to the giant patrolman. He was dressed just like the other boatman — khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a faded Hawaiian shirt. He had dirty casts on both shins, and he was walking stiffly with two canes.

Marsh invited the old man to sit down. He dropped into the chair, licking his lips nervously, looking around at all the uniformed haoles. The Samoan stood behind the chair, baton in hand, slapping it quietly into his enormous palm. Before Marsh could say anything, Kam nudged the old man with the end of his baton.

“You tell’m now, alla same you tell me,” he ordered.

The old man nodded, looked at Marsh, and then looked away, cleared his throat, and told the story. As soon as Marsh heard him say the haole woman got into the boat demanding to go to the Arizona, not the Utah, paying twice the fare in cigarettes, he knew.

Would if I could, she’d said. Glory had gone back to Tommy in the only way she could.

Marsh could not imagine why she would do such a thing. He had long thought that she’d come to grips with Tommy’s passing and that the night of the New Year’s party had marked a milestone of sorts, where she decided to come back to life.

As he sat there contemplating the enormity of what the old man had just told them, Marsh realized that he had finished talking. The Samoan detective was studying the floor. Big Kam obviously understood that he had stumbled onto what the haoles would call a very hot potato and was trying hard to become invisible. Me, too, thought Marsh.

“You want we take him in?” Kam asked.

“No,” Marsh said. “He told the truth, I believe. You think this was his fault?”

Big Kam thought about that. He was HASP, and they only dealt with guilty bastards, but then he shook his head. “No.”

“Then let him go,” Marsh said. “I think the Lewis case is finally closed.”

Kam nodded. “What you gonna do now?” he asked.

“Beats the shit out of me.”

Kam gave a big grin, then prodded the old boatman none too gently with his baton. “You go now,” he said, “and you keep mouth shut about haole woman.”

The old man stared up at him blankly, as if he didn’t understand. Big Kam launched into some high-speed Hawaiian dialect, which produced a series of urgent nods. As they prepared to leave, Marsh asked him what he’d said.

“I tell’m, ghost of haole woman know where he lives. I tell’m, he talk about haole woman, her ghost come to his house, eat all his children.”

“That ought to do it,” Marsh said.

Oxerhaus and Marsh went in to see the admiral that afternoon. Marsh told him the story and waited for some kind of tirade, but it didn’t come.

“You think that’s where she is? Inside the Arizona?”

“I don’t think that old man was making this up,” Marsh said. “I learned earlier that the nurses sometimes go out into the harbor with these guys, just as a lark. They pay in cigarettes, which sounds right. If she jumped over the side right above that hole, she’d have gone straight down into whatever remains of the boiler rooms.”

“Jesus,” the admiral said softly. “And she was not a swimmer?”

“No, sir,” Marsh said. “Tommy Lewis, her husband, was the main propulsion assistant in Arizona on December seventh, and he was aboard that morning. He had the duty.”

The admiral grimaced. “So the question now is, do we send divers down there to find her remains.”

“I think we have to,” Oxerhaus said. “Her body might not be, um, intact at this point in time, but there will be women’s clothing, something…”

“I disagree,” Marsh said. Both of them looked at him in surprise. “First, it would be a very dangerous dive. When that magazine blew, it sent a fireball all the way back through the ship, confined internally by the armored box section. That included the boiler and engine rooms. God only knows the condition of bulkheads and decks down there.”

“Go on,” the admiral said.

“Second, everyone’s already talking about the Arizona as some kind of shrine, a monument to be dedicated to the memory of the Jap attack and the thousands who died that day. That’s a noble prospect. Do we really want to contaminate that with a suicide?”

“But,” Oxerhaus began. Marsh held up a finger to interrupt him, not something people ordinarily did to Hugo.

“If we really have to know what happened to Ensign Lewis, then we’d of course have to investigate the wreck. But here’s the thing: This sounds like a reasonable explanation for her disappearance. She was depressed after having had an illegitimate child, probably still being semi-shunned in the hospital, and she had a breakdown. Suppose we send divers down there and something happens? A deck collapses, a boiler falls over on them while they’re looking? If she did kill herself, is it worth losing more men in that ship just to prove that thesis beyond a reasonable doubt? Perhaps most importantly, is anyone besides us asking?”

The admiral swiveled around in his chair and looked out the big windows. From his office he could see the spot where the Arizona lay, still bleeding oil.

“All good points, Commander,” he said softly. “You’re recommending that we close this case with what we know and what we surmise?”

“Yes, sir, I am. The Navy does not need something like this coming out just now.”

“Or ever,” the admiral said. “Hugo?”

“I can live with that, Admiral.”

The admiral nodded. “Make it so, gentlemen.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” they both said and left his office.

“This is personal, isn’t it?” Oxerhaus asked as they rolled together down the hallway.

“Yes, it is,” Marsh said. “Very.”

“Okay, then. The Navy owes you one. I’ll support it. Was she beautiful?”

Marsh was suddenly having a problem seeing as they approached their respective offices. Oxerhaus pretended not to notice.

“Beyond compare, Commander,” Marsh said. “Beyond compare.”

That night Marsh went to the O-club, rolled himself up to the main bar, and told the bartender he needed to get very drunk. The bartender took one look at his face, called over a waiter, and handed him a bottle of Scotch and a glass. He told the waiter to roll Marsh over to Crips Corner and make sure he ate something in the next hour. Marsh reached for his wallet, but the bartender waved him off. “Sometimes, Commander, we drop a bottle, it breaks, and we gotta write it off. I think I just broke one.”

Sally arrived two weeks later, just in time for Marsh’s first prosthesis, a cuffed clamping-hand replacement. The rehab plan was to get that attachment up and working to the point where he could operate crutches, and then proceed to the next step: an artificial lower leg. After all the operations, Marsh had about three inches of forearm left below the elbow, which was enough to support the cuff attachment. The clamping mechanism was operated two ways. To pick something up, he would wrap the clamps around the object, and then close them using his left hand. To let go of it, all he had to do was bump the button on the bottom of the cuff on any hard surface, and the spring-loaded device would open.

The whole contraption could come off for cleaning and for what the nurses euphemistically called stump hygiene. The first day he wore it, he managed to knock just about everything off his desk and break not one but two coffee mugs. Oxerhaus told him if he couldn’t do any better than that he’d get him an eye patch because obviously he didn’t have any depth perception.

Sally showed up at the base headquarters at 1600 and surprised Marsh in his office. She was in uniform, a lieutenant junior grade now, and she looked wonderful to him, albeit thinner than he remembered. He introduced her to Oxerhaus and all the yeomen, whom she charmed with her brilliant smile. She then insisted on pushing his chair all the way back to the BOQ. His room was on the ground floor because there were no elevators in the building. Once inside the room she pulled the shades, took off her cap, and sat down in his lap.

“Hey, sailor,” she said, and then she kissed him. When they came up for air she began unbuttoning his shirt. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She told him to remove her bra.

Marsh laughed. “One hook or two?” he asked her, waving the stainless steel prosthesis at her.

“Left hand, if you please.”

“Not sure I know how to do that with one hand.”

“Time to learn,” she said, and so he did. She helped by pressing her front into his face.

“Can’t breathe,” he mumbled.

“Then die happy,” she said. “But first? Get closer to the bed and then set the brakes on this thing. We’re about to fall.”

Marsh would never have thought of that. In fact, he wasn’t doing that much thinking just then. After a little while, neither of them was.

Much later, they had dinner at the O-club. Sally rolled his chair to a regular table and asked the waiter to bring a cushion so he could get his one and a half arms up over the edge. He waved at the guys over in Crips Corner and then explained to Sally who they were.

“That’s terrible,” she protested. “Making you into lepers just because you’re in a wheelchair.”

“Seemed fine to us,” Marsh said. “Better service, too. But it is kind of nice to be back with the whole folks.”

“You going to turn martyr on me?” she asked.

“Every chance I get,” he said.

The waiter brought their drinks and a menu. He toasted Sally, and then he asked her to marry him. She was in the middle of taking a sip of her drink when he dropped that little bomb. She put down her glass and cocked her head to one side.

“Seriously?”

“I love you dearly,” Marsh said, marveling inside at how easily that came out. “I’m tired of living alone, and after Leyte I have a whole lot better appreciation for life. I’d like to share it with you.”

She looked down at her left hand and then extended it to his hook. “On one condition,” she said. “This horrible thing comes off at bedtime.”

“Aw, I’m beginning to really like this hook.”

“I do not love your hook, for reasons I should not have to go into.”

“You want me to take it off right here?” he asked. “Maybe wave the bloody stump around? Probably get us a better table.”

“Don’t you dare,” she giggled.

“So the answer is yes?”

“The answer is yes. I would be thrilled to marry you.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Fine.”

“Oops,” he said. “I forgot to get an engagement ring.”

“I think I’ll survive,” she said.

“Maybe we can use this,” he said and slipped off his naval academy ring. He put it on her ring finger. It promptly fell right off. She retrieved it, put it back on her finger, and held up her hand. “This works,” she said. “But since it will just get lost, why don’t you keep it warm for me.”

That night, as they lay in bed in his BOQ room, he told her about what they thought had happened to Glory. She went rigid for a moment, then sighed and wiped away some tears.

“I often wondered if it had been something like that. She seemed so sad when I left for Guam. I was worried about her.”

“Beast McCarty is missing, too.” He told her of Oxerhaus’s vindictive determination to find him and take away his wings. “There’s a story going around that he was the one who crashed into that cruiser. I think I told you about that. We don’t know the truth, and I don’t suppose we ever will unless a better witness comes forward.”

“He was the father, don’t you think?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” Marsh said after a moment. “I do.”

She was silent for a few minutes. The subject of Glory was still a delicate one between them, something of a double-edged sword. He worried that she’d interpret his telling her about what had happened as a sign of some lingering love.

“What would you think,” she said, “if, after we get married, we go find that baby.”

“Wow,” Marsh said. “That’s an amazing idea. We could adopt him, raise him as if he were our own.”

“Yes,” she said. “We could.”

“Then maybe add some brothers and sisters?”

“Count on it,” she said.

He held her close that night. Taking Glory’s foundling into their brand-new family was the one way they both could lay her ghost to rest, and Mick’s, too.

A year and a half after the end of the war, Marsh was the admin officer at the naval base. Hugo Oxerhaus had managed to have one temper tantrum too many, stroking out in his office one day after a particularly violent episode. The new naval base commander asked Marsh if he could just step in and take over the whole office. With no other prospects for naval service, a postwar recession building back on the mainland, and a brand-new wife and baby, Marsh quickly said yes.

The Navy had come out with a notice that they would be offering early retirement at the fifteen-year point to officers in the grade of commander and above. They needed to cull the service of an unbalanced number of senior officers. Combined with a medical disability rating, his pension would be almost as much as if he had gone the full twenty, so he elected to get out before they changed their minds. Sally was enthusiastic about his decision. She wanted to go back to the World, as people who’d been in Hawaii for a long time often called the mainland. Hawaii was a nice place to visit as long as you knew you could leave whenever the urge struck. After four years of war, that urge was very much there, for both of them. Between his pension and her ability to earn as a nurse, they’d be all right until Marsh could find a gainful career.

The paperwork war continued unabated after the Japanese surrender in the fall of 1945. The fleet was demobilizing from ten thousand ships down to one-tenth that number, and, while the ships were being mothballed back on the mainland, much of the Pearl Harbor operational infrastructure was also being shut down. The other major effort was the repatriation of American remains from distant Pacific battlefield islands and atolls back to the brand-new National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. This was a cemetery located in Puowaina Crater, an extinct volcano referred to by the locals in Hawaii as Punchbowl because of its shape. The Army had begun something called a database project at Tripler Hospital, because the repatriation of remains offered an opportunity to conduct a final accounting of the missing and the dead. It was a somber project, done all by hand, and it was expected to go on for the next decade, if not longer.

The Punchbowl memorial wasn’t scheduled to be dedicated formally until 1949. Sally and Marsh had settled in San Diego by then, so Marsh was surprised to receive a formal invitation in 1948 from the Navy Department for both of them to attend the first reinterments, which would be some seven hundred sets of remains from the Japanese attack on December 7.

Marsh wanted no part of a return to Pearl Harbor, with all its painful associations. He was still experiencing bouts of depression whenever he allowed himself to brood about everything that had happened. His physical disabilities were less onerous than he’d anticipated, but there were many times when memories ambushed him. It was difficult for some of his civilian friends to fully understand why he’d drift away from a conversation and stare out into that mental middle distance. He was getting around on a cane and a crude artificial leg, but the wheelchair had not yet been fully retired. That said, he knew that, as a disabled vet, some doors had opened to him in his new career as a law student that might not have opened to someone with both his wings and wheels. He decided to decline the government’s invitation.

Sally seemed to accept his decision, but a week later, she apparently changed her mind. Now she said they had to go. She said that the best way to face down the ghosts of war was to commit them to consecrated ground. Besides, she argued, the president was going to be there. He apparently wanted to see Punchbowl before the formal opening next year. Mr. Truman was in the middle of his own presidential election campaign — his first, since he had become president upon the death of Roosevelt in 1945. Marsh was surprised he would take the time to go all the way out there to an American territory, where there were no votes to be had. Sally told him that he clearly didn’t understand anything about civilian politics.

Marsh’s real problem remained, however. He really didn’t know if he could stand going back. He hadn’t been there for Pearl Harbor, as the December 7 attack was universally called now, but he’d seen the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet soon after. More importantly, the association of Pearl with Mick and Glory was like one of those small red-hot coals that lurk in what appears to be a spent charcoal briquette that suddenly burns the hell out of you. He didn’t want to relive any of that again, both for his sake and for Sally’s, but of course he couldn’t come out and just say that. After three years of marriage, though, with two kids, one adopted and a little girl of their own, Sally got her way. She told him he wasn’t fooling anybody but himself by not talking about it. Finally he gave in and agreed to go.

Once he responded to the Navy Department, they received an official travel manifest to board one of the few remaining Army troop transports still operational for the five-day trip out to the islands. Sally’s mother came out from St. Louis to take care of their little ones. The week before they embarked, Marsh learned that two hundred vets and their spouses had been invited. Sally said that would make it easier, since everyone on board would have experienced the same things.

Marsh didn’t find that news comforting, either. He had already met some wounded vets who were obviously going to make a life’s work of whining about their injuries. Just being at sea again, even on a converted ocean liner, he had to be careful to fully occupy his time and his mind, sometimes with inane activities or conversations, so as not to brood too much about all the friends, classmates, and shipmates who were still out there and who would never be coming back. Even as the transport plowed its way to Hawaii, he was aware that on another transport, at another time, they’d been burying shipmates at sea on this very route.

The day of the Punchbowl ceremony dawned bright and clear. They were all bused out from downtown Honolulu in those familiar gray Navy buses, and once there, the wheelchair brigade got front row seats. Because the president was going to be there, all of them had to be on deck one hour early. Nobody seemed to mind very much. The Punchbowl, which actually he’d never seen in all his years there in Hawaii, was gorgeous. The ancient Hawaiians had thought so, too, because the name of the crater translated roughly to “hill of honor or sacrifice.” In many ways, some of them pretty old, it was already consecrated ground. He wondered as they waited if, by taking it over for a cemetery, the haoles weren’t breaking some more big kapus.

Sally must have known that he would have a hard time with what was coming, because she held his hand from the moment they sat down to listen to the Pacific Fleet band play. Marsh kept his eyes straight ahead and tried to just listen to the music. A few minutes before the official party was scheduled to arrive, a Navy captain went up to the podium and explained the protocol for the presidential visit. The band would play ruffles and flourishes appropriate for the president and then “Hail to the Chief.” Everyone would be requested to stand for the honors. Then he looked down at the line of wheelchairs. “If you can, that is,” he said with a smile. “If not, I’m very sure the president will understand.”

After the official party was seated there would be an invocation, followed by the president’s remarks. Then, he said, there would be a brief awards ceremony.

That surprised Marsh. Most of the vets present were already wearing their medals and decorations, especially among the wheelchair-bound. Marsh hadn’t brought any of his since he was going to be in civvies. He looked around at the battered crowd and wondered who was going to get a medal. Then the band sounded off, the guns banged out the salute to the head of state, and there he was, his back ramrod straight, wearing a white suit with his trademark bow tie and those round glasses twinkling in the sunlight. Behind him came Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz himself. Marsh smiled. For the Navy people attending, it was an honor to be present at a ceremony that included the president of the United States, but Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz? That was like a god stopping by.

Truman’s speech was short and utterly to the point. If ever they had a president who did not indulge in BS, here he was, Marsh thought. When he was finished they all gave him a big hand, although some of them, like Marsh, had to settle for banging claws on their wheelchairs. He’d said the right things, and he’d obviously meant them. Marsh was proud of him.

Then Admiral Nimitz got up and took the podium. He looked unchanged since the war, at least from the pictures Marsh had seen of him both during and afterward. I never did get that personal audience with him, he reminded himself. A silence built as Nimitz stood there and rustled some papers on the podium as if he were waiting for something. Then he looked behind the audience and nodded. At what? Marsh wondered. Sally gripped his hand harder. Then two very large Marines appeared in front of Marsh, came to attention, saluted him, and asked if they could move his chair.

“Oh, of course,” Marsh said, anxious to get out of the way of whoever was going center stage. He looked left to Sally, whose eyes were for some reason brimming. Then the Marines took charge, as is their wont, and now Marsh was being rolled across the front row and then up onto the stage itself, where the principals were all getting up. Even then, he had no idea of what was coming. He looked anxiously for Sally but couldn’t see her, and suddenly he was afraid again. One of the Marines must have sensed it, because a big warm paw landed discreetly on his left shoulder and patted it twice.

They parked him in front of Mr. Truman, who was already standing. The stage and the audience became still. He could hear the flags fluttering and a tropic breeze swishing through the grass along the sides of the Punchbowl. Mr. Truman was looking down at him with a strangely sympathetic gaze. He had a black box in his hand, and finally Marsh understood what was coming. He felt the blood drain out of his face, and only that big warm hand on his shoulder kept him steady in the chair. Now he understood why Sally had insisted they come back to Hawaii. She’d been told.

“In the name of the Congress of the United States of America and a grateful nation,” Truman began, “I hereby present the Congressional Medal of Honor to Commander Marshall Stearns Vincent, United States Navy, Retired, for heroic service and personal valor above and beyond the call of duty as set forth in the following citation.”

As he read out the citation Marsh’s ears began to hum. He didn’t hear a word of it. What he could hear was the cries of his sailors in the dark as the sharks bore in. Once again he saw the rabbi, kneeling on the 01 level on broken legs as the ship began her death roll, his eyes bleeding down his face like Indian war paint, ministering to a man who was already dead. Or the torpedo officer and his talker, who he had thought were still alive, when in fact they had been nailed to the pilothouse bulkhead by a fourteen-inch shell. Or Beast McCarty in his plane with the rearing white horse on the side, turning lazily, almost casually back toward that cruiser that was shooting his Dauntless to pieces and then swooping down like Nemesis herself to break that ship in half. Or Glory Lewis, the bright light of despair in those beautiful eyes, sitting on the front porch of the nurses’ quarters, ashamed of herself as a woman could ever be.

Then Harry Truman was bending down, talking to him. Marsh shook his head, trying to silence all those ghosts and clear his eyes.

“I know exactly what you are seeing,” he said, so quietly Marsh didn’t think anyone but the two Marines holding him up could hear him.

“You’re seeing everyone who never came back and who will never come back,” he said, “and that’s what you should be seeing. You do not ‘win’ the Medal of Honor. You hold it, and you hold it sacred to the memory of everyone who was with you, the quick and the dead. If you did not weep, you would not be human. If it’s any comfort, I still grieve, for all of them, and for all of you. From the United States Congress, and from a grateful nation, our profound thanks.”

These kind words from a man who had implacably loosed the fires of the sun itself against two Japanese cities, and who reportedly did not agonize over making that decision for more than ten minutes.

“Yes, sir,” Marsh whispered. “I understand. Thank you.”

Truman nodded once, then draped the medal pendant over Marsh’s head and down onto his chest. Then he stood back and held his hand over his heart as the Navy band broke into “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” The only thing Marsh was conscious of for the next few minutes was that Marine’s strong hand, without which, he felt, he would have dissolved into thin air.

It was only much later he realized that he still never did get to meet Chester Nimitz. Sally told him that was all right. It had been Nimitz who’d put him up for the Medal of Honor, she said, and he was never one to intrude on someone else’s moment in the limelight.

Nautical twilight was just ending when I finished my tale. My son who was not my son sat in his deck chair, his eyes owl-like and unfathomable. Over on the naval station, a destroyer tested its whistle in preparation for getting under way. The sound carried across the harbor, stirring the sleeping pelicans on their begrimed battleship moorings.

“Got any coffee in there?” I asked, mostly to break the silence.

He nodded absently, then realized that I wanted him to brew some.

“Right,” he said. “Coming right up.”

He stood up, stretched, and then looked back at me. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I feel like — oh, hell, I don’t know what I feel like.”

“You go make us some coffee,” I said. “I’ll get us under way. We have one last thing to do.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see,” I said. He frowned again.

“It’ll be okay,” I said.

I clumped up into the bridge area, air-purged the engine compartment, and then lit off the mains. Once they were rumbling happily, I began to bring up the anchor. The boat eased out in the direction of the hook. Across the harbor, that destroyer let out one long and then three short blasts on her whistle as she began to back away from the pier. There were a dozen gray shapes over there on the destroyer piers, all topped with red aviation warning lights, but one suddenly began to separate from the others.

After a few minutes my son brought up two mugs of coffee, one for me and one for himself.

“Where to?” he said.

“Over there,” I said, pointing with my chin at the Arizona Memorial. “There’s something I have to do. We have to do.”

“I’ve brought countless visitors to that memorial,” he said. “Everyone who comes out here wants to see it. Now you’re telling me that my mother is buried there?”

I nodded. The anchor broke ground with a shudder in the chain, and I slipped the boat into forward drive. Since the sun had not yet risen, my son reached over and switched on the running lights.

We drove forward in silence at idle speed toward the white, bridge-like memorial. I could feel his apprehension, but I had none. I’d done my duty and told him the story. It was all so very long ago and well burned out of me, or so I told myself, anyway. Sally knew that my coming out here now, after all these years, to tell our son the truth was being done as much for my sake as his. I thanked God she had the strength to let me do this, even as I told myself that it was all for him.

We drew abreast of the landing on the harbor side of the memorial. The water still shone with the surrounding shore lights. There was nothing to be seen of the sleeping battleship. She’d settled over the years as her bones, both human and steel, disintegrated. I put the boat in neutral, and we coasted along what would have been her port side. The gates to the memorial were closed at the top of the pontoon ramp. The two obstruction buoys winked at us in their measured sequence: Something’s here, something’s here. Bear away.

I turned to face the memorial, took my son’s hand, and recited the following words as we drifted by her tomb:

Our wake caught up to one of the buoys and set it in motion. Its bell complained, allowing me to finish.

I turned to him with brimming eyes and squeezed his hand.

“And her name was Glory,” I said.