Later they lay side by side, her head on his muscled arm.
“It was never like this before,” she said softly. “All week long it’s been so good! So absolutely wonderful!
“Women, girls too, dream, you know. They dream of the man who truly cares about the woman, the man who cares enough to make sure that the woman’s every need is satisfied. But that dream hardly ever comes true. Now it’s come true for me.” She sighed and let her fingers trail across his shoulder. She turned her face to him, her dark blue eyes almost black in the light.
“I want you to believe that, I truly want you to believe it!”
“I do believe,” he said gravely. “Simply because it has been the same for me. In all honesty, it was good before, with Marie.” He said the name of his dead wife with ease. “It was good. But it was different. Not like it is with you. And now it is my turn to tell you something and I ask you to believe me.” He looked at her, his eyes questioning. She nodded.
“I used to lie in my bunk on Mako,” he said, “remembering, after she was gone. I’d remember every detail of how it was with her, every detail. Now I can’t remember those details. It’s all fuzzy. Each day it gets more and more blurred. Now it’s just a warm and pleasant memory, no details at all. That’s because of you and what you mean to me.”
She reached over, squirming, and kissed his stubbled chin.
“That is a very beautiful thing to say to a woman,” she said softly. “It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. But if you don’t get me some coffee I’ll die! And I get to use the shower first!” She got out of bed and went to the door of the bathroom, her firm buttocks jiggling slightly. He put his arm in back of his head and grinned at her as she stopped at the door and looked back.
“You have got the finest ass this side of the Pecos River,” he said lazily. “Now get it in the shower while I call down for coffee. Then we’ll go down below and I’ll feed you.”
“It’s ‘down stairs’ here on land, sailor and I want orange juice, a stack of wheat cakes and a yard of pork sausage and then I’ll be ready to eat breakfast!” She closed the door to the bathroom behind her and he heard the water in the shower begin to drum.
The romance between the two had been slow to start. During the first week of the tour Hinman had resented Joan’s impatient coaching, her criticisms of his diction and delivery. When he would flare up against her criticism she had shrugged, lit a cigaret and changed the subject. When he had cooled down she would begin again, never wavering in her determination to make his delivery natural, his handling of reporters, friendly and hostile, smoother. It was during the second week that he realized that she was a polished professional in her own line and that her advice was sound. He realized as well that she was more than just a woman in a Navy uniform doing a job. He saw in her the deep, bubbling sense of humor that he had seen in Marie, the clear distrust of anything phony or artificial and the obvious zest she had for life itself.
One evening, a few days after he had begun to appreciate Joan Richards for the singular person she was, they dined in his hotel suite after a banquet at which each had only nibbled at the salad. He finished a piece of chocolate cake that was dessert and at the motion of her fork reached over and appropriated her piece of cake. As he ate it he began to talk.
The words poured out of him. He told her about Marie, about his courtship of the tall, angular girl-woman, about their marriage and about her death and the terrible emptiness it had left in him. She listened, speaking only enough to keep his narrative going, filling his coffee cup, lighting a cigaret for him. And then he had stopped, his face stricken. She reached forward and touched his hand.
“Don’t! It was something you had to do sooner or later. I’m glad you did it, I’m glad you told it to me!”
“I don’t know what got into me,” he mumbled.
“You’ve got it backwards,” she said gently. “It was something that was in you already and had to come out. You can’t keep something like that inside you and bottled up forever. It has to come out, one way or another it has to come out and it came out as it was, as something fine and decent and good. You were a very lucky man. She was a lucky woman. You were lucky to have each other.”
“The reminiscing of an old man!” he said in a low voice.
“Old? Thirty-seven is old? You’re young! You’ve got a lifetime ahead of you and it will be a better life now, for you, for those around you who care about you.”
“How do you know?” he stared at her.
“Because I’m a woman, that’s all. Because I think I know how Marie felt about you. And because I think I know that it makes me happy that she was happy and that you were happy.
“Because I know that if you had not found someone to talk to, to tell about the two of you, that what you kept inside of you would eventually change and corrode and when that happened you would begin to change and dry up inside. I don’t want you to change, not a little bit.”
He looked at her, his eyes veiled. “The Chaplain at Pearl is a wise man. He said almost the same thing but he used some different words. You are a wise woman, Joan Richards.”
She smiled and her face was gentle. “If you say so. Me, I think I’m wise enough to leave you now.” She picked up her clipboard and her handbag.
“I’ll put in a call for seven tomorrow morning,” she said. “For both of us. We’ll have an early breakfast and hit the bricks again. Another day, another dollar. We hit two factories tomorrow morning and then a luncheon speech. Do you know that as of the last accounting you’ve raised more money for War Bonds than anyone except Marlene Dietrich? How does that grab you?”
He smiled at her and she left his room, her head high. She did not, he noticed, swing her hips.
The evening talks in his hotel suite became a regular event. Hinman told Joan of his boyhood, his life at the Naval Academy and his fondness for practical jokes and how that fondness had stunted his career until his marriage to Marie, an Admiral’s daughter. He told her about submarines and the men who sailed in them. And he spoke freely about Captain Severn’s scathing denunciation of himself and Mike Brannon. He told her how Ben Butler’s idea about the War Bond tour had saved his career and that of Mike Brannon as well
Joan said little, only enough to keep him talking. When he asked, she told him about Ben Butler, the respect he was given by his peers in the newspaper business for his honesty and his ability. Once, when he asked, she talked briefly about her own brief marriage and why, although her husband was handsome and on his way to success in the advertising field, she had decided that it was better to be out of the marriage and happy than married and unhappy.
The lid blew off in Los Angeles. The day’s schedule had been crowded; a breakfast for a group of businessmen and a short speech, a tour of a war plant and a short speech and then a luncheon in front of a Rotary group, two afternoon appearances before women’s groups and a formal dinner hosted by the Mayor in the evening.
Joan nudged Hinman on the arm as they walked across the hotel lobby to the ballroom where the dinner was to be held.
“You’re edgy, boss,” she said quietly. “It’s been a heavy day, too heavy. Calm down and take it very easy.” He nodded.
The press hadn’t been around during the daytime appearances but they were out in force for the Mayor’s dinner, which the City Council was co-hosting. By this time, three weeks into the War Bond tour, every newspaper had a fat envelope on Lieut. Comdr. Arthur Hinman, U.S.N. and what he had said in a score of speeches and press conferences. Now the task that faced the press was to get Hinman to say something new or at worst, say what he had been saying in a different form so it would read like news, to come up with new questions that would draw answers that would make good copy.