Sentinels of Fire

SEVENTEEN

As things turned out, my newly sculpted body let me down. Connective tissue problems, recurrent infections, hearing problems, a skull differently shaped from what I was born with, and extensive damage to the biggest organ in my body, my skin, got the best of me. One of the corpsmen tending to me said I looked like a walking (sometimes), talking Peking duck. I tried to glare at him, but my eyelids wouldn’t work. I got my first look at myself a day after Halsey’s visit, and I suddenly admired the admiral’s self-control. For a long while, my skin looked like vellum. Halsey, being a victim of shingles, must have sympathized.

Malloy was escorted back to Guam and then to Pearl by two destroyer escorts, and the crew, captained now by newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Enright, fought an insidious flooding problem all the way back. At Pearl they dry-docked her and discovered she had a cracked keel assembly along a hundred and fifty feet of her hull, probably caused by that big bomb on kami number four. The net result was that the BuShips rep at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard recommended a strike. She was cannibalized for every spare part that was still usable, defueled, and then scuttled fifteen miles off Diamond Head in fifty-eight hundred feet of water. Jimmy Enright, Mario, and Chief Dougherty personally opened the sea chest clean-out valves, and she was gone in twenty minutes.

I was sent to the big naval hospital on Guam for treatment and rehabilitation, after which they sent me back to the even bigger naval hospital complex in San Diego known as Balboa. There a tropical medicine specialist found the fix for my skin problems, and I was officially discharged from the hospital and then medically retired in the rank of commander, USN. I walked out of the hospital into the eternal San Diego sunshine with no place to go, no car, and no nearby friends or relatives that I knew about. I got maybe a hundred yards before I had to sit down. Being semicrushed under the weight of the Malloy’s pilothouse structure had done far more damage than anyone had been aware of, and I knew I was lucky to be alive. Being eased out of the Navy, albeit kindly, with good medical care and a pension, was equally crushing. I hadn’t realized how much my entire adult life had been defined by the Navy.

I had been moved to an ambulatory ward in late July. “Ambulatory” covered a whole spectrum of cases; mostly it meant that you no longer needed constant treatment, but rather, time to heal. It was staffed by an office full of smiling sadists who insisted that each day you walked just a little longer, and when you were done with that, you got to go play in the rehab room with the same kinds of things Torquemada used to refresh the Faith and set the answer to an occasional question. After a couple of weeks I realized that if I did these things voluntarily, the sadists would leave me alone. That’s when I discovered a room in the ward next door that contained what was left of Pudge Tallmadge.

I’d taken to reading the name tags outside the patient rooms as I hobbled through the wards in my pj’s and bathrobe, clumping along with the assist of two canes at first, and then one. I’d read the name, kept going, stopped, and turned around. The door was cracked open, and there was a woman whose face I recognized sitting in a chair by the window, reading a magazine. I knocked on the door.

“Yes?” she asked. The likeness was remarkable. I’d seen her picture on the skipper’s desk every time I’d gone into his inport cabin. She was probably forty, a little on the plump side, with a sweet face and hair beginning to go gray.

I stepped in. She put a hand to her mouth and then apologized for her reaction. “You look terrible,” she said. “What happened to you?”

I tried to smile, but my facial muscles weren’t quite following orders yet. The resulting grimace probably frightened her. I introduced myself, trying not to mumble, and said I’d been exec in Malloy under Captain Tallmadge, who was lying there in the hospital bed, eyes closed, looking positively serene.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Connie Miles. Right. My God, what happened to you? Where’s the ship?”

“The ship is asleep in the deep,” I said. “It’s a long story.” I looked over at the captain, which is how I would always remember him. The captain. His eyes opened briefly, staring vacantly into the middle distance. His hands were resting comfortably on his chest, and his mind was long gone, from what I could see. She saw me looking.

“Oh, don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s resting. Now tell me, what became of Malloy? He loved that ship.”

Resting, I thought. Well, I guess that was one word for it.

“May I sit down?” I asked, suddenly conscious of the fact that my legs were trembling. I’d learned not to let that go on for very long.

She jumped out of her chair and led me to it. Then she left the room. She came back a moment later with a second chair, pulled it close to mine, and sat down. She asked me to tell her the story. Everything.

So I did. I kept glancing over at him, but he simply lay there, eyes closed again, breathing in, breathing out.

“They wouldn’t tell me anything,” she said. “I got a telegram that he’d been injured and was being sent to Guam, and from Guam, here. I got here from Maryland just about when he did. I expected … injuries, but this is how he was. They said they didn’t know when, or even if, he’d come out of it.”

She seemed resigned to his mental state, as if this was just a matter of time before he woke up one day and called for coffee. “What happens next?” I asked her.

“They’ve told me that they will train me to take care of him — bedsore management, one of the nurses called it, and, of course, hygiene. Then I’ll take him home to the Eastern Shore. Soon, I hope.”

I hadn’t noticed feeding tubes or IV lines. “He can eat?”

“I put a spoon to his mouth, he takes it. I can get him up, take him to the bathroom, and his body seems to know what to do. Better than a coma, they tell me.”

“Well, then there’s hope, Mrs. Tallmadge,” I said. “If he can do all that with your help, then one day he’s going to look around, see that he’s safe, and come back out.”

“That’s the plan, Commander Miles. That’s the plan.”

I realized then that he was in capable and strong hands. I knew a doctor had probably sat her down and laid out the possibilities, and she hadn’t flinched. One of the advantages of a good marriage, I thought. I made my manners and told her to contact me if she needed anything. She asked where. I realized that I had no idea, so I took down her address and telephone number and promised to contact her from wherever I eventually landed, probably in Washington, D.C.

A week before that, the hospital administrator had informed me that the Navy was going to medically retire me. There’d be a pension, but after only ten years of service not much of one compared to the stipends given to officers who served the traditional twenty or even thirty years. My personal effects from Malloy had arrived in a cruise box from Pearl, along with a big black-and-white, framed picture of the entire crew, assembled on the 10–10 dock at the Pearl Harbor shipyard, and signed by every one of them on the back. There was a second picture, taken by Marty, of Malloy’s stern standing straight up in the air before making her final plunge. I ended up throwing most of the uniforms away since they hung on my somewhat emaciated frame like old laundry. I kept the crew picture and gave the other one away to the local Naval District Public Information Office.

Mrs. Tallmadge had asked where she could contact me. My mother was still alive and retired in the D.C. area. Having no job, no car, and no skills applicable to anything out there in the civilian world, I’d probably have to go home, regroup, and start over. The only good news was that I had almost four years of paychecks saved up in the Riggs Bank of Washington, so money wasn’t going to be a problem, for a while, anyway. I knew that eventually, when the Japs finally gave up, there’d be a huge wave of people just like me coming home. The newspapers were already commenting on the influx of veterans coming back after VE-day, and there’d been editorials speculating on what the country was going to do with them, and for them.

I did have one more thing to do before I walked away from all things naval, and that involved going to a small town in Georgia. I still had trepidations about making that trip. It had sounded like the right thing to do when I went down to sick bay that morning, but now I wondered. How would a widow and a family react to a perfect stranger appearing on the front steps bearing something so terribly personal as two rings and a lock of hair?

Amazingly well, it turned out, and with grace and dignity besides. I’d taken a train from California to Atlanta. The train took four days to make the trip, during which I spent a lot of time just looking out the window with my mind in neutral. I rode in a normal Pullman car and not in one of the two cars allotted to recovering soldiers and sailors, each with its own small medical team. I hadn’t been back to the continental United States since early 1942. Any leaves I had taken had been at R&R sites in the Pacific. It was pleasant to just look out the window and reacquaint myself with America. It looked pretty good.

Before leaving San Diego I’d sent off a letter addressed to Mrs. William Van Arnhem, care of the post office in Monticello, Georgia, telling her I was coming to bring her some of the commodore’s personal effects. I spent a day in Atlanta resting up after the train trip, having arrived on August 6, 1945, the day we dropped the big one on Hiroshima. Based on the radio news, the war might be ending sooner rather than later. The next day I put on a coat and tie, packed my two bags, and hired a car and driver to take me to the booming metropolis of Monticello. Hiring a driver was a bit of an extravagance, but I hadn’t driven a car in years and doubted my ability to find my way around the southern countryside. Not to mention that I was still pretty weak from my time at Balboa.

When I got to the tiny town of Monticello, and it was indeed tiny, I found the post office, introduced myself, and asked if a letter to Mrs. Van Arnhem had come through. The postmistress, a peppery lady of uncertain age, wanted to know who was asking. I told her that I’d sent the letter and now needed to take something to Mrs. Van Arnhem. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, she knows you.” That apparently was the key: She knew me. How, I didn’t know, but the postmistress gave my driver, a middle-aged black man by the name of Homer, directions to the plantation, known locally as Blue Pines.

I expected to see Tara looming majestically up on a hillside when we turned, as directed, into a long, tree-lined lane across from a large red barn. Instead, the one-lane sandy track wandered for at least a mile through fields of drying feed corn. The trees along the road were not stately oaks but some unidentifiable and distinctly scrubby specimens of little character. The house, when it finally appeared, was a two-story farmhouse with a wide front porch and a green metal roof. No columns, huge brick chimneys, or second-floor verandahs, and definitely no clusters of happy black people humming gospel songs as they loaded bales of cotton onto horse-drawn wagons. Clark Gable was not much in evidence, either.

Oh, well, I thought. This was probably what real plantation houses looked like. I hadn’t seen any blue pines, either, but there were two vintage 1939 cars parked to the side of the house under the only oak tree I’d seen since arriving. It was just before noon, and the place seemed to be entirely deserted. For a moment I thought about simply turning around, but meeting Mrs. Tallmadge had strengthened my resolve.

“What do you think, Homer? Anybody home?”

“They be out directly, suh,” he said. “Country folk gonna take ’em a look before they come steppin’ out when strangers come.”

He was right. A minute later the front door opened, and the woman whose picture I’d seen framed in the commodore’s cabin stepped out onto the front porch. She was maybe five foot two and dressed in what surely did look like period clothes, as she had been in that portrait. She looked older now; a death in the family will do that to you, I told myself.

I got out of the car. Homer said he’d just wait outside if I didn’t mind, so I walked up to the front steps. I was escorted by two friendly, tail-wagging dogs who’d appeared out of nowhere. I had to take one step at a time, but without a cane, finally.

“Mrs. Van Arnhem?” I said. “I’m Commander Connie Miles. I had the pleasure of serving with your husband, the commodore. I hope you received my letter?”

“I did, Commander, I did,” she said in a lovely and cultivated Southern accent. I thought I saw someone else move behind one of the heavily curtained front windows. “Dutch told me about you in a letter just before he died. He said you showed great promise. Won’t you come in, please.”

I walked up the steps and took her hand briefly, and then we went inside.

“Have you come far, Commander?” she asked over her shoulder. The front hall was much cooler than the front yard. There was a living room to one side, a dining room on the other, and an ornate stairway dead ahead. Judging by the floors, moldings, and the thickly plastered walls, the house had to be nearly a hundred years old.

“From the other side of the world,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Yes, that must be so,” she said. “Dutch could never tell me where he was at any given time; the censors, you know.” She showed me into the living room, where we took seats. A Negro maid appeared with a tray service of what looked like iced tea and sugar cookies. Had she been expecting me? Of course, I realized. The postmistress.

“We were together at an island called Okinawa,” I said. “Which is only a couple hundred miles south and east of the Japanese home islands.”

“Did you know about this new bomb, an atomic bomb I think they called it?”

“No, ma’am, but from what they’re reporting, I suspect the war against Japan will end pretty soon, hopefully without the need to invade. The Okinawa invasion was bad enough.”

She nodded. “We listen to the evening news, of course, but the radio correspondents seem to always have a very optimistic slant on how things are going.”

I smiled. “That’s called propaganda, I think,” I said. “But in fact, Okinawa has been taken, and now the Army Air Forces are systematically pulverizing the home islands. I am, however, well out of it.”

I explained my medical retirement after only ten years in the Navy, and she displayed some sympathy. “Does it bother you?” she asked. “That you must leave the Navy? It was everything to Dutch.”

“Yes and no, Mrs. Van Arnhem,” I replied. “The Okinawa campaign was very hard on the Navy, and I myself will be a long time healing, I think.” I told her in relatively sanitized terms about what had happened to me and the ship. My ship. One of his ships. That thought stopped me for a moment, and she looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

“I am very, very tired,” I said. “Rising to the rank of commander in ten years would have been impossible before the war, and in my case, it happened less because of any personal merit and more because of circumstances.”

She nodded. “Dutch talked about that, before he left for the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, he said, there would be big changes coming to the fusty old Navy. I would love to hear more, Commander, especially since my Dutch is not coming home.”

I hadn’t come there to talk about myself, but this charming lady had managed to put me at my ease. I almost felt embarrassed.

“He was buried at sea?” she prompted.

“Yes, ma’am, he was,” I said. “As the captain, I officiated. It was a formal burial ceremony, or as formal as we could make it. He’d only been aboard for a brief time before the attack. He was on the bridge in his unit commander’s chair when the attack came.”

She nodded, almost absently, and looked off into the middle distance. A cloud passed over the sun outside, and the room dimmed for a moment. Too much, I told myself. She doesn’t want to hear this. Her husband’s well and truly gone, consigned to the depths of the Pacific, that great eater of seagoing men and their presumptuous little ships.

“You said you were going to bring me something,” she said finally. “The Navy returned some of his personal effects — uniforms, his sword, some hats.” She looked at me inquiringly with sad eyes.

I took a deep breath and nodded. From inside my coat I removed a silver cigar case. It wasn’t entirely appropriate, but I hadn’t had much time in Atlanta to find anything else. I handed her the case, which she opened. Inside were his Naval Academy ring, his wedding ring, and an antique flat silver locket with an oval of glass in the front. And inside that …

I think she first focused on the rings. She smiled a smile of sweet sadness, and yet it was as if she were welcoming the rings back home, back to their rightful place. Then she saw the locket.

She gasped and almost dropped it, but then she picked it up with trembling hands and stared at it, her eyes welling up. Oh, God, I thought. I shouldn’t have done this. What had I been thinking?

Then she pressed the locket between her tiny hands, closed her eyes, and began to weep. I felt like I should say something, anything, to comfort her, but I recognized that this was a very private moment, a homecoming vastly different from that of the two rings. This was between them. I wasn’t even there.

After a few minutes she composed herself. “You did this?” she asked in a shaky voice.

“Yes, ma’am, and I’m very sorry to have upset you. I thought—”

“Oh, no,” she said, cutting me off. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. How did you know?”

I took a deep breath. “The captain”—I was relieved—“told me that the commodore was married to a very traditional Southern lady. As I recall my history, a locket, with a lock of hair, was an old custom in the South. Since no part of him was ever coming back, I just thought you might appreciate it.”

“My. Dear. God,” she said. “You have no idea.”

Actually, looking at her face, I did. For once I’d done something completely right. I felt good enough about it that I forgot about my aching bones for a few minutes while she sat there clutching that silver locket and rocking gently in her chair.

“Tell me everything, young man,” she said at last. “What he was like, how he looked, what happened at the end. Everything. I haven’t seen him for three years, you know. Tell me everything, please.”

We spent the next few hours in that living room, sipping on sugary tea, with me telling her probably more than I should have about our time on the Okinawa picket line. Toward the end I began to run out of steam, which was when she took a really good look at me. Then things happened quickly. Homer was dispatched back to Atlanta with, I found out later, a ten-dollar tip. My two bags and I were hustled up to a guest bedroom, complete with a four-poster bed, an armoire, and a huge wooden fan stirring the air above. I was firmly instructed to take a long nap. As I was stowing some of my clothes, the maid who’d brought the tea knocked discreetly on the door and delivered another tray, this one with some fancy crustless sandwiches and a cold beer. Navy family, I remembered. Libations would be available in the parlor at six, dinner at seven, and I was, of course, spending the night. I didn’t argue.

I came down at six much refreshed. I would have probably slept until the next morning except that I’d heard female voices out in the upstairs hall. When I got downstairs, wearing the same coat and tie but with a fresh shirt, I got a surprise. A much younger woman was there on the sofa beside Mrs. Van Arnhem, and I recognized her face from that portrait on the commodore’s desk. Turned out her name was Julia, and she was, as I’d thought, their daughter. She’d arrived from Atlanta while I was sleeping off my cross-country trip.

Julia looked more like her father than her mother, with dark brown hair, sly brown eyes, and a very pretty face that would not have been out of place in Gone With the Wind. While her mother affected the mannerisms and dress of the nineteenth century, Julia was very much a denizen of the twentieth, if her stylish dress and sophisticated way of carrying herself were any indication. Her lipstick was vividly red, and there was a cigarette case on the coffee table in front of her that I was pretty sure did not belong to the lady of the house. She had elegant, slim legs and looked as if she knew her way around an after-hours nightclub. She gave me a frankly appraising look when we were introduced, which immediately had me wondering how well I’d scored. Given that I was twenty-five pounds underweight, with the remains of dark circles under my eyes and a way of moving that probably resembled a large but injured insect, I suspected not very well. This young lady looked like she regularly feasted on handsome, rich playboys up in Atlanta, assuming there still were any rich playboys, that is. I realized then there was a lot I didn’t know about the United States of America in late 1945. I wondered if I was going to like it.

After supper we migrated to the living room for coffee. Julia offered me a cigarette when she lit up and seemed faintly disappointed that I didn’t join her. Her mother excused herself after a little while. Julia promptly got up, went to a small sidebar I hadn’t noticed, and poured a couple of cognacs for us. I asked her what she did for a living.

“I’m in the finance department of a large bank up in Atlanta,” she said. “Investments, putting commercial deals together. That sort of thing.”

“The only thing I know about finance is that it went off the rails in 1929,” I said. I remembered the pay cut the Army and the Navy took in the mid-1930s as a result of the Depression that followed.

She nodded. “It’s making its way back,” she said. “Especially in Atlanta. That city is going to boom one day, and I wanted to be in place when it does.”

“Are there that many women in finance?” I asked.

“There are now,” she said. “Well, not very many, but more than none. The war did wonders for women’s opportunities in business. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when all those men come back home.”

“You think women will be pushed out?”

“I think that the competition is going to be really fierce,” she said. “That’s why I plan to start my own company this year. It’ll depend on how many clients I can poach from the bank when I leave, but I want to have it in place when everybody starts looking for work. How about you? What are you going to do once this horrible war ends?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Actually, I’ve been medically retired, so I’m really out of the Navy now. They say I’m physically unfit for active duty after Okinawa.”

She nodded. “What will you do for money, then?” she asked.

The financier, I thought, getting right to the point. “I’ve got almost four years of paychecks saved up,” I said. “I’m not married, so I just banked it. I’ll be okay for a while, I think.”

“That’s good, because unemployment is going to go through the roof after the war. The economy’s going to contract hard until the politicians get another war going somewhere. Europe is devastated. That’s going to take a decade to fix, and somehow we’re going to have to find a way to get the Germans back to work. They’re the only ones who really do work over there, you know.”

“Sounds like interesting times ahead,” I said. “I may just sit them out.”

She gave me a strange look, seemed to make some kind of decision, finished her cigarette and her cognac, and then looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow and get back to the city,” she said. “But right now I’d like you to meet someone. I’ll be right back.”

I sat back in my comfortable chair and looked around the parlor, with its twelve-foot-high molded ceilings, real if slightly shabby wallpaper, and furnishings from what looked like the 1880s if not earlier. What do they do way out here in the sticks, I wondered. There’d been crops in the fields, but who was tending to the farm if all the men were gone?

“Commander Miles,” Julia said, coming back into the room, “I’d like to introduce my younger sister, Olivia. Livy, this is Commander Connie Miles, of the United States Navy. He brought back Father’s rings, and the locket.”

On Julia’s arm was a vision, dressed all in white. Olivia was probably late twenties, slim, taller than her sister, with gorgeous blond hair and one of those faces that make perfectly intelligent men walk into lampposts. She was hanging on lightly to Julia’s left arm, and then I saw why: Those gorgeous blue eyes saw nothing at all. Olivia Van Arnhem was blind.

“Olivia,” I said, rising to my feet. “A pleasure to meet you.”

She turned her head in my direction and I tried not to stare at her, then realized, I could if I wanted to — she couldn’t see me. Julia could, though, and she gave me a sympathetic look that seemed to say, A terrible waste, isn’t it? She steered Olivia to the big sofa and sat down beside her, not holding her up, but close enough that Olivia would know she was right there.

“Commander,” Olivia said, in a soft Southern drawl, something Julia had dispensed with. “You did a wonderful thing, bringing that locket. It meant the world to Mother.”

“I was almost afraid to bring it,” I said. “The longer I thought about it, the bigger intrusion it seemed. But…”

“Yes,” Olivia said, “but we’re very grateful you did. I can still remember the day that car came up the drive and those two officers got out. Mother went stiff as a board, and that’s how I knew why they were here. She’d been so confident, you know. He was a senior officer, a commodore, and so less exposed to danger than younger officers. Or so we all thought.”

“He was a little bit safer when he was down in the fleet anchorage,” I said. “Being a commodore. But then he came north to the picket line when things got really tough. I think he knew I needed help, and I was very glad to have him embark. Now I wish he’d stayed at the anchorage.”

“The picket line,” Olivia said. “The anchorage. Commodore. I don’t really know what those words mean, Commander. You must tell me about them.”

Julia looked again at her watch and then stood up. “Livy,” she said, “I’ve got to get to bed. I’m sure the commander can get you back to your room when you tire.”

Olivia smiled at a secret thought. “Come back soon, Jules,” she said.

Julia gave me a little finger wave and went upstairs. Olivia gestured for me to join her on the couch. “Bring one of those cognacs, if you’d be so kind.”

I did, wondering how she knew we’d been having a cognac, and then I remembered the stories of how the other senses of the blind become much more acute. I sat down next to her, steered the glass into her hand, and clinked mine against hers. She smiled again and took a sip.

“When I tire,” she said, repeating Julia’s words and shaking her head. “I’m blind, not a fucking invalid.”

I choked on my cognac, and she started laughing.

“Gotcha,” she said. “Now you must call me Livy.”

That’s how I ended up spending the rest of my life in the wilds of middle Georgia. Okay, semiwild, although the farther one gets from Atlanta, the thinner becomes the veneer of civilization in the biggest state east of the Mississippi.

I stayed the next three days there at the farm as their guest, during which Livy and I spent almost all our waking hours together. I’d read about things like that, but never, especially after the nightmare of Okinawa, expected it to happen to me. Livy had not been born blind; her affliction was the result of a riding accident when she was sixteen, involving a fairly serious head injury. She was very functional around the house and adept at getting around the grounds, since she’d grown up on the family plantation. I once commented to Livy that it must be interesting to be a member of one of the first families of Georgia. She’d laughed at me. She did that a lot, but it was always a sweet laugh. “The so-called first families of Georgia were all snuffed out in the Civil War,” she explained. “We’re all descendants of the Carpetbaggers.”

The point was, she was as secure and mobile as she could ever be right there at home, and, like her mother and unlike her sister, she was probably never going to leave it. By that time, of course, I was madly in love, so this posed a decision for me. It took me a good five minutes, and we were married after a “suitable” courtship of six months, to prove, as I later found out, that there was no whiff of scandal in the form of early babies in the offing. Not that Livy would have cared; nothing frightened that woman, not even when I would have a bad night and wake up shouting unintelligible orders to a bunch of ghosts.

I have not forgotten, nor will I ever forget, those ghosts, those brave souls and small fighting ships whose lives and futures were so harshly extinguished in that crucible called the Okinawa picket line. The ghosts — from the white hats to the commodores, and even those demented and much-damned young Japanese pilots, the kamikazes — have long since been transmuted into a variety of glorious life forms at the bottom of the deepest sea. The ships, broken, burned, shredded, and mangled, are finally at peace, as the cold dark heart of the Pacific rusts them back into the elements from which they were created.

We did the best we could. From time to time I find myself missing the smell of fresh coffee on the bridge, or Mooky’s fat-pills. The rest of it has gone down in my memory like the ships of the picket line. That saddens me, until I look over at Livy. Then it’s sunrise at sea again, the very best time of the day.