WW III

from the pills, the corrosive self-pity. To be with her brother. The plan was to comfort him, to think of someone else for a change. Their parents.

Beth and the two children had come down again from Bremerton. It was supposed to be what a family did in crisis, but here was Dr. Franz Lehman, maxillofacial specialist, seemingly still unmoved by their pleas to see him.

In fact, he understood their concerns very well. It was for that reason he was so insistent on them not seeing Ray so soon after the first of the long series of operations that would be necessary to reconstruct something that resembled a face. Skin grafts from the arm and hip seemed promising, but in any event, it would be a long time.

The “baker bar,” Dr. Lehman explained, would be only a small part of it, a curved four-inch gold rod cemented to the top jaw, replacing bone that had been smashed by shrapnel. After building the bar, anchoring it either side in the remaining bone, a partial denture of five teeth could be attached to the bar by two small inverted U-shaped clips inside the denture, the gum line being a meld of plastic and gold to reduce expansion and contraction coefficients. A millimeter difference could cause maxillofacial strain on the mandibular joint, and the telltale click, in most people merely the sound of the joint functioning, would in Ray Brentwood’s case cause massive malfunction, the precursor of severe headaches that would involve the whole head and radiate deep into the neck, shoulders, and lower back.

“Couldn’t we see him for just a second?” Lana pleaded, though she knew well enough from her premed days that it was useless to push. But she felt somehow that if she could see him, it would help — just say a few words to him.

But in the doctor’s experience, it didn’t help at all. It was doubtful whether, under the pain medication, which was only partially effective in burn cases anyway, the patient was fully cognizant of what was going on, and often the confusion only added to the burden of inner anxiety being suffered.

It was better to wait awhile, not because the patient didn’t need support or, like so many Vietnam vets, was refusing to see anyone out of a sense of bitterness, of having been rejected by his country. But the ugliness of the tight, polished skin where the fire aboard the Blaine had burned him made Ray Brentwood want to withdraw into a deep cave of cool silence, where the pain from the searing fire that made every breath an agony might finally abate. In that cave, Dr. Lehman knew, the greatest fear of all could be hidden for a while, to prepare him for the shock in the mirror of the visitor’s eyes, the eyes that could never lie despite the visitor’s determination not to betray shock or any other kind of surprise. In Ray Brentwood’s case there was an added torture to the constant searing pain of his disfigurement: As captain of the Blaine, he was solely to blame not only for his own condition but for all those, one hundred forty-three men, who had died in the attack on the Blaine. Like the parent of a lost child, he constantly replayed the attack. If only he’d given an order for left-hand rudder, perhaps the missile might have missed them altogether. If only he had picked up the skimmer on radar — or was it fired by a ship? In which case he couldn’t be blamed. Could he?

What stoked the nightmarish obsession and knotted his stomach with anxiety was the thought of the coming inquiry, when he would have to explain to the board why he, the captain, had abandoned the USS Blaine while she was still afloat. Of course, he must tell them the truth — but what was the truth?

He remembered being conscious at the time, but couldn’t remember giving the order to abandon ship, and the worst of it — the worst possible outcome for a captain — was that the Blaine, though badly holed, listing dangerously to port and spewing flame, had her fires doused by monsoon rains that night only to emerge, her fires out, towed in ignominiously by the Des Moines to the shipyards at Nagasaki, where she was now undergoing repairs.

Whatever had happened, Ray Brentwood knew that as captain of one of the United States Navy’s most modern warships, he was the man responsible. And along with the dead skin of his body now blistering and peeling, revealing pink and custardlike mucous below, Ray Brentwood saw the death of his honor as well as his career and all the dreams he had brought with him from Annapolis, which during the fifteen years he had worked so hard to attain. Exonerated or not, in that deadly phrase of the navy’s, his being named a “party to the inquiry” meant he would never command again.

Early one morning he had managed, against hospital orders, to ease himself out of bed. It had taken him fifteen minutes, his legs in poor shape but not broken, to shuffle with the stoop of an old man — to straighten up was to stretch the skin — toward the washroom. He had sat for twenty minutes trying to defecate, but the painkillers had constipated him badly and it was impossible for him to do anything. When, slowly, he got up, he risked a look at himself in the mirror, now that some of the gauze had been removed. The only discernible features were his eyes, the rest of what had been his face an angry red of loose and taut skin, the two orifices of what used to be his nose obscenely turned up, one hole smaller than the other where the cartilage had collapsed, his breathing hoglike because of the melted flesh obstructions inside, his lips peeled back, suture scars on scabrous skin seeping. His speech, they told him, should be all right after much of the internal swelling from the operations had diminished. In any case, he would have to continue being fed through straws, daily astonished at how different food tasted when pureed to slop. In the vortex of pain and loneliness, only death seemed to offer any solution, but he’d been brought up a Catholic, and though no longer a practicing one, those early years had marked him too, teaching that despair was a sin itself. Even so, had it not been for Beth and the children, he doubted whether he could have held on.

He refused to see any of his family, and Robert, the one member who John and Catherine Brentwood thought might have the best chance of getting through next to Beth, because of security considerations covering submarine whereabouts at sea, could not be informed, his Sea Wolf 2-SSN USS Roosevelt being on patrol.

Beth had been allowed to see Ray only once. And he asked her not to bring the children. She didn’t argue with him, and after she had been carefully robed in antiseptic gown, cap, and mask, she was only grateful that he could not see anything other than her eyes. She could not sit on the edge of the bed, because the slightest change in surface tension over the sheet would cause Ray’s whole body to stiffen in pain, which the doctors called “discomfort.”

“Do you good in here,” Beth had said bravely. “Lose a bit of weight before you come—” But she couldn’t say “home.” Home had been another place, had been another time, when the world was another place. Everyone and everything had changed forever.

“I love you,” she said, gripping the bed rail, willing herself again against her heart not to touch him. He mumbled something, his voice nasal and rough like someone with bad flu. Even a cold, they said, would kill him in his present weakened condition.

The very worst thing, she told Ray’s parents and Lana, was that because of the suturing they’d had to do on his face, he was unable to smile for fear of tearing open the now-closed fissures.

It was a thing you took for granted, she told Lana as they sat together in the visitors’ room, waiting for the doctor’s latest report. With Ray unable to smile, Beth told Lana, there was no way of knowing he was all right, no comfort for her or for anyone else around her. Lana wasn’t really Beth’s type, Beth had always thought, too busy… always wanting to do something… not bossy exactly but a doer who made you mad with your own inaction… ate all the right foods, and smart. Not that there was anything bad in being vigorous, healthy, or clever, but sometimes after a day with the kids, she felt such a flop compared to Lana. And a little bit of jealousy — here was Ray, disfigured for life, and there was Lana, wife of Jay La Roche. What could she possibly know about their kind of life, with her big cars, always dressed like a fashion plate? Some said she looked like a brunette Grace Kelly. Not a hair out of place. Never disorganized, and nice on top of it all, especially about Ray. But then, she could afford to be. Next week it would probably be Palm Springs or some charity ball for President Mayne’s war bond drive. She could walk away from the pain.

“… Of course, they might not take me,” Lana was telling Beth. “I used to have asthma as a child. At least, that’s what they told me. Personally I don’t think they were ever sure whether it was more an allergic reaction. Anyway, I had to choose, Daddy said. Asthma or Prince, our dog. I suppose Ray’s told you all about it. I kept the dog. My parents had a dingdong row about that one.”

“Who mightn’t take you?” asked Beth, trying to disentangle the conversation.

“The Waves,” said Lana. “I have a year of premed, and they told me before I left New York that—”

“But what about your husband?”