The Winds of War

having to eavesdrop, she rattled the knob and went in. The two young men rose from the sofa where they sat hunched in talk. Lieutenant Aster, in a blue and gold uniform and white peaked cap, was eating an apple.

“Hi, Natalie. This is one terrible thing to do, breaking in on honeymooners,” he said cheerily. “Talk about extrahazardous duty!”

“What’s the matter?”

Byron said, “Change of orders, nothing serious or urgent, no sweat.”

“Right. Matter of fact I was just shoving off.” Lieutenant Aster dropped the apple core in a tray. “I have to round up some crew members that had overnights. It’s going to be an interesting tour of Estoril and Lisbon after dark. See you, Byron.”

With a grin at her, and a brief tip of his rakishly tilted hat, the lieutenant left.

“Well? Tell me.” Natalie confronted her husband, arms folded.

Byron went to the red marble fireplace and touched a match to papers under a pile of kindling and logs. “The S-45 leaves this morning.”

“This very morning, eh? Too bad. Where to?”

“I don’t know. The fall of Tobruk has changed the mission — which to tell you the truth, I never exactly knew in the first place. Something about surveying submarine facilities in the Mediterranean.”

“Well. All right. I guess I asked for this. My entire married life — as it may yet turn out — cut short by one- third.”

“Natalie, our married life starts when you get back from Italy.” He put his arm around her and they stood watching the fire brighten. “It’s going to be very long, happy, and fruitful. I plan on six kids.”

This made the young wife laugh through her gloom and put a hand to his face. “Oh lord. Six! I’ll never last the course. Jiminy, that fire feels marvellous. Did we finish the wine before we went to sleep? Look and see.” He brought a glass of wine and lit a cigarette for her. “Briny, one thing you should know. Back in November, Aaron was so sick he thought he might die. I had to take him to a specialist in Rome. It was a kidney stone. He lay in the Excelsior for two weeks, really in torture. Finally it cleared up, but one night, when he was very low, Aaron told me that he’d left everything he has to me. And he told me what it added up to. I was amazed.” She smiled at him, sipping her wine. Byron looked at her with slitted eyes. “I guess he’s sort of a miser, like most bachelors. That’s one reason he moved to Italy. He can live handsomely there on very little. Aaron’s actually kept nearly all the money he made on A Jew’s Jesus, and it brings in more every year. The book on Paul earned quite a bit too. And before that he’d saved a lot of his professor’s salary. Living in Italy, he hasn’t even paid taxes. Aside from the value of his house, Aaron’s worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. He lives just on his interest. The money is invested back in New York. I had no idea of any of this. Not the slightest. That he would leave anything to me never crossed my mind. Nevertheless, that’s how things stand.” Natalie took Byron’s chin in her hand and pushed it this way and that. “What are you looking so grim about? I’m telling you you’ve married an heiress.”

Byron poked a fallen red coal back into the fire. “Damn. He’s really cute, cuter than I thought.”

“Are you being fair? Especially with your plan for six kids?”

“Possibly not.” Byron shrugged. “Do you have enough money to get home with? You’re coming home in two months, no matter what.”

“I know. I agreed to that. I have plenty. Whew, that fire’s beginning to scorch.” She reclined on a couch before the blaze. The negligee fell away, and the light played warmly on her smooth legs. “Briny does your family know you intended to get married?”

“No. No sense making trouble when I wasn’t sure it would come off. I did write Warren.”

“Is he still in Hawaii?”

“Yes. He and Janice love it. I think you and I may well land there. The Navy keeps beefing up the Pacific Fleet. Warren thinks we’ll be fighting Japan soon. That’s the feeling all through the Navy.”

“Not Germany?”

“No. It may sound strange to you, sitting here, but our people still don’t get excited about Hitler. A few newspapers and magazines froth around, but that’s about it.”

He sat on the floor at her feet, looking at the fire, resting his head against her soft uncovered thigh. She caressed his hair. “Exactly when do you leave, and how?”

“Lady’s going to come back for me at six.”

“Six? Why, that’s hours and hours. Big big chunk of our marriage left to enjoy. Of course you have to pack.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Can I go with you to the boat?”

“I don’t see why not.”

With a deep sigh, Natalie said, “Why are you sitting on the floor? Come here.”

There was no dawn. The sky turned paler and paler until it was light gray. Mist and drizzle hid the sea. Lieutenant Aster picked them up in a rattling little French car; the back seat was packed with four glum sailors smelling of alcohol and vomit. He drove with one hand, leaning far out to work a broken windshield wiper, keeping the accelerator on the floor. The foggy road along the river was empty, and they reached Lisbon quickly.

The submarine was dwarfed by a very rusty tramp steamer berthed directly ahead, with an enormous Stars and Stripes painted on its side, an American flag flying, and the name Yankee Belle stencilled in great drippy white letters on bow and stern. Its grotesquely cut-up shape and crude rivetted plating looked foreign, and thirty or forty years old. It rode so high in the water that much of its propeller and mossy red bottom showed. Jews lined the quay in the drizzle, waiting quietly to go aboard, most of them with cardboard suitcases, cloth bundles, and frayed clothes. The children — there were quite a number — stood silent, clinging to their parents. At a table by the gangway, two uniformed Portuguese officials, under umbrellas held by assistants, were inspecting and stamping papers. Policemen in rubber capes paced up and down the queue. The rail of the ship was black with passengers staring at the quay and the Lisbon hills, as freed prisoners look back at the jail to savor their liberty.

“When did that ocean greyhound show up?” Byron said.

“Yesterday morning. It’s an old Polish bucket, and the crew are mostly Greeks and Turks,” Aster said. “I’ve tried talking to them. The pleasanter ones seem to be professional cutthroats. I gather the Jews will be packed in like sardines in five-decker bunks, for which they’ll pay the price of deluxe suites on the Queen Mary. These fellows laughed like hell about that.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Well, we cast off at O715. Good-bye, Natalie, and good luck. You were a beautiful bride, and now you’re a beautiful Navy wife.”

The exec stepped aboard, smartly returning the salute of the gangway watch. On the dock near the gangway, unmindful of the rain beginning to fall, a sailor was hugging and kissing a dumpy Portuguese trollop dressed in red satin. Byron held out his arms to his wife, with a glance at the sailor and a grin. She embraced him. “You fool. Your trouble is, you went and married the creature.”

“I was drunk,” Byron said. He kissed her again and again.

“A boatswain’s whistle blew on the submarine, and a loudspeaker croaked, “Now station the special sea details.”

“Well, I guess this is it,” he said. “So long.”

Natalie was managing not to cry; she even smiled. “Getting married was the right idea, my love. I mean that. It was an inspiration and I adore you for it. I feel very married. I love you and I’m happy.

“I love you.”

Byron went aboard the submarine, saluting as he stepped on deck. In the thickening drizzle, her raincoat pulled close, her breath smoking in the damp frigid air, Natalie stood on the dock, smelling wharfside odors — tar, machinery, fish, the sea — hearing the bleak cry of the gulls, and feeling for the first time what she had gotten herself into. She was a Navy wife all right!

Three men in black trench coats and oversized fedora hats came strolling along the quay, calmly inspecting the refugees, who either tried to ignore them or peered at them in horror. Women pulled their children closer. The men halted near the gangway, one pulled papers from a black portfolio, and they all began talking to the officials at the table. Meanwhile on the submarine sailors in pea coats pulled in the gangplank. The boatswain’s whistle blew; the loudspeaker squawked. Appearing on the narrow little bridge in foul-weather clothes the captain and Lieutenant Aster waved. “Good-bye, Natalie,” Captain Caruso called. She did not see Byron come out on the forecastle, but