It was Andrea. “You okay, Rose?”
“What — er, yes. I just got a little start — that’s all.”
“Start—honey, you were taking off. Sooner you have that baby, kiddo, better off you’ll be.”
“You’re right. I feel like a brontosaurus.”
“Well come on back to the house and we’ll put our feet, up. What you need is a Manhattan with lots of ice.”
“Sorry,” Rosemary said. “No alcohol — the baby.”
“Rosemary, you sure are the worrier.”
“I know,” Rosemary conceded. “I wasn’t like this at home.”
“This here’s your home now, honey.”
The shock of that revelation — that Andrea Rolston was right, that home would now be where the submariners lived — immediately made Rosemary despondent. She had known this was true ever since she’d married Robert, but the actuality of their move from Holy Loch in Scotland to Bangor in Washington State was now hitting her full force, and although she wanted to preserve the British stiff upper lip, she already missed Robert as if he had been gone a month, and despite Andrea’s best efforts, felt terribly alone.
Still, Andrea’s bonhomie was so persistent that it couldn’t help but mitigate Rosemary’s mood. And soon, Andrea told her as they drove home, it would be time to send the sub its “familygrams.” These were messages of no more than thirty-six words in which a man’s family had to condense all the important information on the home front. Rosemary tried composing one in her mind as Andrea talked on, but though she had taught the art of précis to a generation of English schoolboys, she now experienced difficulty in summarizing her thoughts — in large part because she felt so uncharacteristically lonely. But Robert wasn’t to know this, and so she struggled with the familygram. “How about this for a familygram?” she asked Andrea. “ ‘All’s well with Brentwood Junior. Made friends with Andrea Rolston. Feeling fine. Miss you. Rosemary.’ “
“Hell, honey,” Andrea said. “That’s only — let’s see, about — fifteen words.”
“Well there’s nothing much else to say,” she said rather lamely, and felt Andrea’s hand on her shoulder, grateful for once for the spontaneity of affection that came so naturally to Americans and that to the English was so often off-putting to one brought up on a staid diet of English preserves and reserve. Then as spontaneously as Andrea had been with her — almost as in the spirit of quid pro quo— Rosemary asked if there was anything Andrea wanted to say to her husband. Rosemary could use the remaining number of her words on her familygram.
“Aren’t you the sweetie?” Andrea said, and added to Rosemary’s familygram, “ ‘Andrea’s ready for meat. Can you bring home the bacon?’ “
At first Rosemary thought Andrea was talking about some dietary problem, but when Andrea winked Rosemary’s face turned beet red. “Andrea! Surely you can’t send that!”
“Honey,” Andrea said, bipping a passing motorist for coming too close on passing, “you should see some of the stuff those boys get. You know they pin the spiciest familygram up on the notice board.”
“Oh—” Rosemary said. “Oh!”
“No, no,” Andrea hastened to reassure her. “The guy who gets the familygrams pins them up with names clipped out after everyone’s read theirs. That way you never know who sent what. Course,” Andrea added with a gleam in her eye, “you can always guess.”
Rosemary was appalled by the idea, by Andrea’s infectious lighthearted view of life, and at the same time attracted to it. The executive officer’s wife certainly wasn’t going to die of ulcers. However, Rosemary, despite all of Andrea’s gregarious banter, couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. But in the constant ebb and flow of traffic it was impossible to tell. She even watched those cars that passed them to see if they’d merely done it as a ruse only to drop back behind Andrea’s car a few minutes later. Robert had done the same thing in Scotland earlier in the war when he suspected that enemy Special Forces troops from what was now the CIS had been following them from one bed-and-breakfast place to another. It gave her no comfort to realize that the CIS were no longer at odds with the West, for she knew through Robert that after the Sino-Soviet split had been mended by Gorbachev and others that Chinese methods were often extensions of lessons they’d been taught by the Soviets in the bad old days, just as the British Special Air Services and U.S. Delta Force had trained their allies. Besides, it was a more confusing world now with ever-shifting alliances and old scores to settle — and a much more dangerous one.
Andrea felt Rosemary’s silence. It filled the car like a funereal dream. “Rosemary, honey, you have got to relax for your sake and the baby’s. Lighten up. You should have bought that dress I showed you — the maroon. That’d look terrific on you.”
“I’m afraid buying things — clothes — doesn’t perk me up like I assume it does most women.”
Now it was Andrea’s turn to be appalled. “Rosemary, that’s downright unhealthy. I can see I’ve got my work cut out with you.”
“Oh please don’t bother. I’m sorry I’ve been such a drag today. I just feel—”
“Blah!” Andrea said, tapping Rosemary’s knee. “I know — believe me. Everyone expects you to be mad with joy over the coming event. Lordy, I felt like — what I mean is, everyone expects you to be on cloud nine. Wasn’t with me.”
“It wasn’t?” Rosemary inquired, a sudden hope in her tone.
“No way. When I was due I was ready to go out and play in traffic. Thought I was gonna die and the young Eddie with me. And then before I knew it they had me in an ambulance, sirens blaring so’s to let everyone know I was about to drop one — Lord, I hate those sirens. Anyway, oat popped Eddie. Ugliest thing you ever saw — all bumps and angles and face all flushed and bloody like one of those drunks on skid row. I was not a happy camper. Anyway, pretty soon I started feeling more myself again and now Eddie’s my darlin’. Wouldn’t trade him for anything.”
“So you never had any postpartum blues?” Rosemary asked.
“Oh yes, ma’am. For about three months — sat in the living room in the dark.”
“What did — I mean, if it isn’t a rude question — what did your husband do?”
“Do? I think he did it by himself — a lot.”
“Did — oh, oh!” Rosemary was beet red again. “I meant now did he take it?”
“Pretty good for the first two weeks, then he told me to get off my butt and stop embarrassing the hell out of him. Said it could ruin his promotion from XO to skipper — you know, nutty wife, undue strain on the family. So—” Andrea gave a truck coming too near a blast. “Those guys think they own the road.”
“So you got over it?”
“I sure did. Course I did a lot of shopping. Got me out of the house.” She winked at Rosemary. “He didn’t like that much but what could he say?”
For the first time that morning, Rosemary visibly relaxed. She’d found a friend — rough at the edges but someone who, unlike many officers’ wives, wasn’t afraid to say she’d been afraid of having her first child. Someone she could talk to.
“Don’t you fret, Rosie,” Andrea said. “I’ll stick by you.”
“Oh, that is nice of you, Andrea. I confess to you I’m terrified of all the pushing and — is it, I mean is it as bad as it looks on all those documentaries?”
“Worse,” said Andrea matter-of-factly. “Now get this. Eddie — Eddie Senior — took a video of it.”