“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.”
“Did you have kids?”
“No. By the time I married, children were pretty much out of the question, really. We married rather late in life. I was thirty-four, Frank was forty-four. Children would have just messed things up. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.”
“We play the hand we’re dealt,” he said softly. “Sounds like you made some better choices than I did. Still want to hear this?”
She nodded.
“Right. Well, when I got back from Vietnam in 1970, 1 had a three-plus-year-old little horror and a wife with the beginnings of a drinking problem. Once again, I didn’t really notice. I was off to the next rung on the ladder. My career, Liberalles. We sold the house, shagged off to Newport, Rhode Island, for department-head school-that was six months-and then back to San Diego for my department-head tour.
Oh, great: more sea duty. Not exactly the most stable family life. I was finishing up that tourthat was, I guess early 1972, when Galantz came calling.
Jack was about five. By then, Beth was using fruit juice laced with vodka just to get through the day, and I was just starting to wonder how this would all come out-especially Jack. “
“Did you get help with Jack?”
“Well, yes and no. We used some Navy counselors at Balboa hospital, but they were dealing with seriously disturbed kids-schizophrenics, kids with severe learning disabilities. To them, Jack was a discipline problem-not a mental problem, but behavioral.”
“They know a little bit more about that today.”
“I wonder,” Sherman said. “But in our case, there were two problems. The first was the old who’s-in-charge problem. Beth ran the household when I was away at sea, which was most of the time. Then I’d come home for a couple of weeks and try, to take over. Kids are smart: They learn to divide and conquer. But Jack posed a legitimate question: Whose rules did he have to follow? Did everything change just because Daddy was home?”
“I’ve heard other Navy people talk about that. And the second problem?”
“Five years ago, I would have said it was hers. But in retrospect, it really was mine. That’s one of the things Elizabeth showed me.
Basically, I didn’t much like my son, so I abdicated. Jack became Beth’s problem child, not mine. I seized on the excuse that it didn’t make sense for me to come home at irregular intervals and change all the rules.
By leaving her in charge, I could simply back out of the problem. I had an operations department and a career to worry about. Mommy can be in charge on the home front.
Mommy can own it. Again, in retrospect, pretty lousy for’ her.” Karen looked down at the table for a long moment. She was struck by the fact that his wife and her replacement had almost the same names. The waiter came by and cleared away the dishes and asked about dessert. Both declined and asked for coffee.