He started to reply but then hesitated, as though unsure of her. “It’s not a pretty story,” he said at last. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“I apologize, Admiral,” she said immediately, afraid she had overstepped the bounds of junior-senior propriety. “1-“
“No, don’t apologize.. And let’s put the admiral commander stuff aside for a moment here, Karen. After what we’ve learned tonight, I need your help. I need your legal expertise. I need your brains, now more than ever. This is no longer admiral-commander territory. But there’s history, history that bears on what happened between Elizabeth and me. I guess what I’m saying is that I just can’t toss off a cavalier answer.
And the other thing is, I wouldn’t want this to be discussed with anyone else. I’ve already disclosed too much to the police, I’m afraid.”
She thought about that. He was obviously referring to her real loyalties visa-vis Carpenter. But, as a woman, she was also very curious as to what could have happened to make a marriage to this attractive and intelligent man go off the tracks.
“Yes,” she said. “I do want to help you. But you must understand something: Except as a very junior officer, I’ve never been anyone’s lawyer. Anyone’s advocate. I’ve been a professional second-guesser for most of my career. My specialty is to sit in judgment over other people’s investigative efforts. That’s not the same as being an experienced investigator or trial attorney. And, as much as I do want to help you, I’m in an equivocal position here: I work for Admiral Carpenter. So if you’re about to tell me something he shouldn’t hear, you probably shouldn’t tell me.”
“I understand that,” he said. “At this point, I probably should go into JAG and ask for formal counsel. But you were there in Kensington’s office: The moment I do that, there’ll be red rockets going up in the flag community, which, as best as I can tell after a few months of being a member, would happily cut its losses where someone in my situation is concerned. I’ve worked for nearly thirty years to get this star. I’m not ready to just throw it away because the admiral herd is getting antsy.”
“Yes, sir.” She smiled. “Now tell me as much of the history as I need to know.” He signaled the waiter and asked him to bring them another glass of wine.
“I grew up a Navy junior,” he said-. “When my dad was a commander in a heavy cruiser based down in Norfolk, he was killed in a shipboard accident. He was an Annapolis grad, so naturally I gravitated to the Academy. With some help from his classmates, I got in on a presidential appointment.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Well, I graduated it( 1966. Did the not-terribly-bright thing of getting married on the same day.”
“Had you known her long?”
“Yes. Since high school. We’d been sort of circling each other in the eighth grade. When Dad was killed, she became terribly important. When I went into the boat school, she went off to American University. For the first year, my plebe year, none of us was allowed to date. But her letters kept me alive. And we saw each other during Christmas holidays, and later, after my summer cruise. After that, we dated steadily for the next three years. It was all so, I don’t know, convenient. Comfortable.
Reliable. She was pretty, bright, and fun. I was nothing much at the Academy, did okay in academics but was otherwise undistinguished. She helped to define who I was: the guy with this good-looking girlfriend.”
“What was her.name?”
“Her name was Beth. Actually, her name was Marcia Kendall. Beth was a name she adopted in the third grade, and that’s what everyone called her. Her father was a history prof at the Academy, in what we called the”Bull’ department: English, history, and government.” He caught her look. “Yeah, well, Canoe U. has always been a little bizarre in its nomenclature. If you didn’t go there, you probably can’t understand how inbred Annapolis and the whole Naval Academy scene was.”
“Sounds like a typical college town.”
“Probably. Except that Annapolis also happens to be the capital of Maryland. But the mids are oblivious to that little fact. Anyway, back then there was only one academic major, and that was naval engineering.
Everybody did the same thing, the same-the summer cruises. Marched to class. Same plebe year BS. You couldn’t whine or complain about the regimen or discipline to anyone. But I had Beth.”
Karen sipped her wine.
“She’d been around the Academy as long as I had, so she knew the score.
Knew what I was going through. Anyway, we got married, graduation day wedding number thirteen-thirty minutes, guests in, ceremony, guests out, swords up, swords down, next couple, please. But even on the assembly-line basis, it was romant;c-the chapel, the big organ, the guys holding crossed swords, the whole bit. And we were free-free of the Yard, the walls, our parents, all the chicken rules and regs. I knew my old man would have been very proud. I had done it-carried on the all-important tradition. It was a day to remember.”
“And then?”
“And then a month to get across the country, report in to the fleet, and experience our first collision with reality.
We set up housekeeping in a little cracker-box house in San Diego, three tiny bedrooms, two baths, a living room and a kitchen, and the all-important two-car garage. All the houses the same, and all eight feet apart. Three cars in every yard.
And then I went to sea. And I mean, I went to sea. My first ship was gone seventy percent of the time. Vietnam was starting to come to a boil in the fall of 1966. Hell, when I left the Academy in the summer of 1966, 1 don’t think I even knew where Vietnam was. But off we went, out to WESTPAC, to the Seventh Fleet, and that was the big time, the Navy’s first team.
“Back in San Diego, Beth had Jack-that’s my son-in January 1967. Seven months after graduation, but who was counting? And that’s when the trouble began, I think. She was pregnant, on her own, and trying to live on ensign’s pay, which in those days was two hundred and twenty-two dollars a month. And then I heard about the Swift boat program, and naturally I volunteered. At first they said no. I was Academy, a regular officer, bound for department-head school. They were sending only extended reservists to the boats. But then they changed their mind, and off I went to gunboat school in Coronado.”
“How did she feel about that?”
“About what you’d think. The training lasted two months, which was ironically the longest straight period of time I’d been home in over two years. But then I shipped out with my boat crew to the Philippines for two months, and then went in country for a year. I saw Beth once during that year-in Hawaii during our one R-and-R period.”
“So, two years of arduous sea duty, a new baby, thenwhat, fourteen months of overseas duty, with one week in Hawaii to make it all up?”
You got it. Except it was five days, not a whole week.
R and R was actually almost painful for the married guys.
We tried like hell to carry it off, but it didn’t really work.
You knew on day one that there were only four days left.
You could almost tell how many days a couple had left by the looks on their faces. I was jet-lagged, and she was desperately tired, something I didn’t really anticipate. There was a lot I didn’t notice. Like too many of us at that age, my focus was on me. My career. My adventures in Vietnam.
My prospects for the next assignment. My future in the Navy. And there was another problem: little Jack. The baby was hitting the terrible twos, and giving new meaning to the term. If Jack comes visiting, watch him every minute. He would hit and hurt other kids. He broke stuff. He ran off and hid when you came to find him. He disrupted the nursery school, when we could afford one. He went through baby-sitters by the dozens. Of course, Beth didn’t tell me any of this during our one week in the Hawaiian paradise.
Jack was ‘difficult at times’ was all I got.”
“Was the child ADD?” she asked. “Or was it a psychological problem?”
He smiled. “We didn’t even know about attention deficit disorder, or dyslexia, or any of that stuff. People were just fairly blunt about it: The Shermans had a bad kid, that was all.
“It is amazing how ill-prepared we humans are to raise a child,” she mused, turning her wineglass in her hands.
“We train for everything else but just fearlessly jump into the baby scene.”
