The Caine Mutiny (2 page)

The fugitives exchanged an understanding look. Willie’s hand crept around to his back, to ascertain how hollow his hollow back really was. He began a series of frenzied efforts to touch his toes. At every bend he came nearer. He broke out in a sweat. Once he thought the tips of his fingers brushed his shoelaces, and he gurgled in triumph. With a swoop and a groan he brought his fingers squarely on his toes. Coming erect again, his spine vibrating, the room spinning, he found that Keefer, rolled over and awake, was staring at him with frightened little eyes. Keggs had backed into a corner. Willie attempted a lighthearted laugh, but he staggered at the same moment and had to clutch the desk to keep from falling over, so the effect of nonchalance was marred. “Nothing like a little setting-up exercise,” he said, with drunken savoir-faire.

“Hell, no,” said Keefer. “Especially three o’clock in the afternoon. Ah never miss it myself.”

Three rolled-up mattresses came catapulting through the open door, one after another. “Mattresses!” yelled a retreating voice in the hall. Blankets, pillows, and sheets flew in, propelled by another disembodied voice shouting, “Blankets, pillows, and sheets!”

“Couldn’t imagine what they were less’n he told us,” growled Keefer, untangling himself from a sheet which had draped itself on him. He made up a bed in a few moments, flat and neat as if it had been steam-rollered. Willie summoned up boys’ camp experience; his cot soon looked presentable. Keggs wrestled with the bedclothes for ten minutes while the others stowed their books and clothes, then he asked Keefer hopefully: “How’s that, now?”

“Fella,” said Keefer, shaking his head, “you an innocent man.” He approached the cot and made a few. passes of the hand over it. The bed straightened itself into military rigidity, as in an animated cartoon.

“You’re a whiz,” said Keggs.

“I heard what you said about me bilging,” said Keefer kindly. “Don’ worry. I be there on the great gittin’-up morning.”

The rest of the day went by in bugles, assemblies, dismissals, reassemblies, announcements, marches, lectures, and aptitude tests. Every time the administration remembered a detail that had been omitted in the mimeographed sheets the bugle blared, and five hundred sailors swarmed out of Furnald Hall. A fair-haired, tall, baby-faced ensign named Acres would bark the new instruction, standing on the steps, jutting his chin and squinting fiercely. Then he would dismiss them, and the building would suck them in. The trouble with this systole and diastole for the men on the top floor (“tenth deck”) was that there wasn’t room for them all in the elevator. They had to scramble down nine flights of stairs (“ladders”), and later wait wearily for a ride up, or else climb. Willie was stumbling with fatigue when at last they were marched off to dinner. But food revived him wonderfully.

Back in their room, with leisure to talk, the three exchanged identities. The gloomy Edwin Keggs was a high-school algebra teacher from Akron, Ohio. Roland Keefer was the son of a West Virginian politician. He had had a job in the state personnel bureau, but, as he cheerfully phrased it, he didn’t know personnel from Shinola, and had simply been learning the ropes around the capitol when the war came. Willie’s announcement that he was a night-club pianist sobered the other two, and the conversation lagged. Then he added that he was a Princeton graduate, and a chill silence blanketed the room.

When the bugle sounded retreat and Willie climbed into bed, it occurred to him that he had not had a single thought of May Wynn or of his parents all day. It seemed weeks since he had kissed his mother that same morning on 116th Street. He was not far, physically, from Manhasset, no further than he had been in his Broadway haunts. But he felt arctically remote. He glanced around at the tiny room, the bare yellow-painted walls bordered in black wood, the shelves heavy with menacing books, the two strangers in underwear climbing into their cots, sharing an intimacy with him that Willie had never known even in his own family. He experienced a most curiously mixed feeling of adventurous coziness, as though he were tented down for the night in the wilds, and sharp regret for his lost freedom.

CHAPTER 2

May Wynn

Having one of the highest draft numbers in the land, Willie had passed the first war year peacefully without taking refuge in the Navy.

There had been some talk of his returning to Princeton after graduation for a master’s degree in literature, the first step toward a teaching career. But in September following a summer of tennis and multiple romances at his grandparents’ home in Rhode Island, Willie had found a job in a cocktail lounge of a minor New York hotel, playing the piano and singing his original ditties. The first earned dollar has remarkable weight in deciding a career. Willie elected art. He was not paid much. The fee was, in fact, the smallest permitted by the musicians’ union for a piano player. Willie didn’t really care, so long as fifty-dollar bills flowed from his mother. As the proprietor, a swarthy, wrinkled Greek, pointed out, Willie was gaining professional experience.

His songs were of the order known as cute, rather than witty or tuneful. His major piece, sung only for the larger crowds, was
If You Knew What the Gnu Knew,
a comparison of the love-making ways of animals and humans. The rest of his works leaned heavily on such devices as rhyming “plastered” and “bastard,” and “twitches” and “bitches”-but instead of saying the off-color word, Willie would smile at his audience and substitute a harmless one that didn’t rhyme. This usually provoked happy squeals from the kind of audiences that collected in the cocktail lounge. Willie’s close-trimmed Princetonian haircut, his expensive clothes, and his childlike sweetness of face served to dress up his slender talent. He usually appeared in fawn-colored slacks, a tan-and-green tweed jacket, heavy English cordovan shoes, tan-and-green Argyle socks, and a white shirt with a tie knotted in the latest knot. Considering the entertainment merely pictorially, the Greek had a bargain in Willie.

A couple of months later the proprietor of a very dingy night club on Fifty-second Street, the Club Tahiti, saw his act and bought him away from the Greek with a raise of ten dollars a week. This transaction was concluded in an afternoon interview at the Club Tahiti, a dank cellar full of papier-mâché palms, dusty coconuts, and upended chairs on tables. The date was December 7, 1941.

Willie emerged from this meeting into the sunny street full of exultation and pride. He had risen above the minimum union wage. It seemed to him that he had overtaken Cole Porter, and was well on the way to nosing out Noel Coward. The street, with its garish, weather-beaten night-club signs, its magnified photographs of nobodies like himself, looked beautiful to him. He stopped at a newsstand, his eye attracted by unusually big and black headlines:
JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR.
He did not know where Pearl Harbor was; in a passing thought he placed it on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal. He realized that this meant the United States would enter the war, but the turn of events seemed in no way comparable in importance to his engagement at the Club Tahiti. A very high draft number, in those days, helped a man to keep calm about the war.

The new rise in the entertainment world, announced to his family that same evening, was the deathblow to Mrs. Keith’s faltering campaign for Willie’s return to comparative literature. There was, of course, talk of Willie’s enlisting. On the train ride to Manhasset he had caught some of the war fever of the excited commuters, so that his sluggish conscience stirred and gave him a prod. Willie brought up the subject at the end of dinner. “What I really ought to do,” he said, as Mrs. Keith heaped his dessert dish with a second helping of Bavarian cream, “is chuck the piano
and
comparative literature, and join the Navy. I know I could get a commission.”

Mrs. Keith glanced at her husband. The mild little doctor, whose round face much resembled Willie’s, kept his cigar in his mouth as an excuse to remain silent.

“Don’t be absurd, Willie.” In a lightning estimate Mrs. Keith abandoned the distinguished phantom, Professor Willis Seward Keith, Ph.D. “Just when your career begins to look seriously promising? Obviously I’ve been wrong about you. If you can make such a spectacular rise so quickly, you must be very gifted. I want you to make the most of your talents. I really believe, now, you’re going to be a second Noel Coward.”

“Somebody’s got to fight the war, Mom.”

“Don’t try to be wiser than the Army, my boy. When they need you, they’ll call you.”

Willie said, “What do you think, Dad?”

The plump doctor ran a hand through the remaining strands of his black hair. The cigar emerged from his mouth. “Well, Willie,” he said, in a warm, quiet voice. “I think your mother would be very sorry to see you go.”

So it was that Willie Keith sang and played for the customers of the Club Tahiti from December 1941 to April 1942 while the Japanese conquered the Philippines, and the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
sank, and Singapore fell, and the cremation ovens of the Germans consumed men, women, and children at full blast, thousands every day.

In the spring two great events occurred in Willie’s life; he fell in love, and he received a notice from his draft board.

He had already undergone the usual loves of a college boy with spending money. He had flirted with girls of his own class, and pressed matters further with girls of lower station. Three or four times he had considered himself plunged in passion. But the explosion into his life of May Wynn was a wholly different matter.

He arrived at the Tahiti on that slushy, drizzly day to play the piano for auditions of new acts. The Club Tahiti was dreary in all times and weathers, but most so in the afternoons. The gray light came in then through the street door and showed bare spots in the frowzy red velvet hangings of the lobby, and black blobs of chewing gum ground into the blue carpet, and blisters in the orange paint that covered the door and its frame. And the nude girls in the South Seas mural looked peculiarly mottled by reason of spatterings of drink, frescoes of tobacco smoke, and layers of plain grime. Willie loved this place exactly as it was. Looking as it did, and smelling as it did of stale tobacco, liquor, and cheap deodorant perfume, it was his domain of power and achievement.

Two girls were sitting near the piano at the far end of the chilly room. The proprietor, a pale fat man with gray stubbly jowls and a face marked with deep soured lines, leaned on the piano, chewing a half-burned cigar and leafing through a ‘ musical arrangement.

“Okay, here’s Princeton. Let’s go, girls.”

Willie shed his dripping galoshes by the piano, stripped off his brown rabbit-lined gloves, and sat at the stool in his overcoat, inspecting the girls with the horse trader’s eye of a man of twenty-two. The blonde stood and handed him her music. “Can you transpose at sight, honey? It’s in G, but I’d rather take it in E-flat,” she said, and from the twanging Broadway tones Willie knew at once the pretty face was an empty mask, one of hundreds that floated around Fifty-second Street.

“E-flat coming up.” His glance wandered to the second singer, a small nondescript girl in a big black hat that hid her hair. Nothing doing today, he thought.

The blonde said, “Here’s hoping this cold of mine doesn’t ruin me completely. Can I have the intro?” She plowed through
Night and Day
with determination, and little else. Mr. Dennis, the proprietor, thanked her and said he would telephone her. The small girl took off her hat and came forward. She placed an unusually thick arrangement on the music rack in front of Willie.

“You might want to look at this piece, it’s slightly tricky.” She raised her voice to address the proprietor. “Mind if I keep my coat on?”

“Suit yourself, dear. Just let me look at your figure sometime before you go.”

“Might as well look at it now.” The girl opened her loose brown waterproof coat and turned completely around.

“That’s fine,” said Mr. Dennis. “Can you sing, too?”

Willie, examining the music, missed the view, though he turned to look. The coat was closed again. The girl regarded him with a slight mischievous smile. She kept her hands in her pockets. “Does your opinion count, too, Mr. Keith?” She made a pretense of opening the coat.

Willie grinned. He pointed to the arrangement. “Unusual.”

“Cost me a hundred dollars,” said the girl. “Well, ready?”

The arrangement was no less ambitious a piece than Cherubino’s love song from
The Marriage of Figaro,
with words in Italian. Midway it broke into a syncopated parody in clumsy English. At the end it returned to Mozart’s music and Da Ponte’s words. “Haven’t you something else?” Willie said, noting that the singer had amazingly bright brown eyes and a handsome mass of chestnut-colored hair rolled up on her head. He wished he could see her figure, and this was a strange wish, since he was indifferent to small girls and disliked reddish hair; a fact he had explained away as a sophomore with the aid of Freud’s theories as a repressive mechanism of his Oedipus complex.

“What’s the matter? You can play it.”

“I don’t think,” said Willie in a stage whisper, “that he’ll like it. Too high-class.”

“Well, just once, for dear old Princeton, shall we try?”

Willie began to play. The music of Mozart was one of the few things in the world that affected him deeply. He knew the aria by heart. As he called the first notes out of the battered yellowing keyboard scarred with cigarette burns, the girl leaned against the piano, resting one arm on the top so that her hand, loosely closed, hung over the edge near his eyes. It was a little hand, rather more square of palm than a girl’s should be, with short, thin, strong fingers. Roughness around the knuckles told of dishwashing.

The girl seemed to be singing for the pleasure of friends, rather than for an urgently desired job. Willie’s ear, trained by many years of opera-going, told him at once that this was no great voice, nor even a professional one. It was just such singing as a bright girl who had a love of music and a pleasant voice could accomplish, and it had that peculiar charm denied great performers, the caroling freshness of song for its own sake.

The melody filled the gloomy cellar with radiance. The blonde, going out at the door, turned and stopped to listen. Willie looked up at the girl, smiled, and nodded as he played. She returned the smile, and made a brief gesture of plucking the imaginary guitar accompaniment of Susanna. The motion was full of casual humor and grace. She sang the Italian words with a correct accent, and apparently knew what they meant.

“Watch for the break,” she suddenly whispered at him in a pause of the singing. She reached down in a darting movement, turned the page, and pointed. Willie swung into the jazzed-up portion of the arrangement. The singer stood away from the piano, spread her hands in the conventional pose of all night-club singers, and ground out a chorus, moving her hips, wrinkling her nose, affecting a Southern accent, smiling from ear to ear, throwing her head back on every high note, and twisting her wrists. Her charm was obliterated.

The jazz part ended. As the arrangement returned to Mozart, so did the girl to her natural ease. Nothing could be pleasanter, thought Willie, than the negligent way she leaned against the piano with hands deep-thrust in her coat pockets, and trilled the fall of the song. He played the last after-echo of the melody with regret.

The proprietor said, “Darling, do you have any standard stuff with you?”

“I have
Sweet Sue, Talk of the Town
-that’s all with me, but I can do more-”

“Fine. Just wait, will you? Willie, come inside a minute.”

The proprietor’s office was a green-painted cubicle in the rear of the cellar. The walls were plastered with photographs of actors and singers. The light was a single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Mr. Dennis wasted no money on decorations not visible to customers.

“What do you think?” he said, applying a match to a cigar stump.

“Well, the blonde is no barn-burner.”

“Guess not. What about the redhead?”

“Ah-what’s her name?”

“May Wynn,” said the proprietor, squinting at Willie, possibly because of the burning cigar end an inch from his face.

Occasionally a name is spoken that sets up a clamor in one’s heart, as though it has been shouted in a big empty hall. Often as not the feeling proves a delusion. In any case, Willie was shaken by the pronouncing of the words, “May Wynn.” He said nothing.

“Why? What did you think of her?”

“What’s her figure like?” replied Willie.

The proprietor choked over his cigar, and flattened its meager remains in an ashtray. “What’s that got to do with the price of herring? I’m asking you about her singing.”

“Well,
I
like Mozart,” Willie said dubiously, “but-”

“She’s cheap,” said Mr. Dennis meditatively.

“Cheap?” Willie was offended.

“Salary, Princeton. Couldn’t be cheaper without bringing pickets around. I don’t know. Could be that Mozart thing would be a delightful novelty-distinction, class, charm. Could also be that it would clear out the place like a stink bomb-Let’s hear how she does something straight.”

May Wynn’s
Sweet Sue
was better than her previous jazz singing-possibly because it wasn’t inserted in a framework of Mozart. There was less of hands, teeth, and hips, and a paling of the Southern accent.