"Anyone for cocktails?" Bullitt said, going toward the locked cabinet for the bottle of alcohol.
Williams laughed with an enormous, lifting sense of relief, and closed and locked the sick-bay door.
AS THE SHIP proceeded south through calm and sunny waters, the improbable sense of being on a pleasure cruise heightened and grew. At noon, during the lunch hour, jazz records were played from the bridge, over the public-address system, the program arranged by Ole Jensen, quartermaster first class. Jensen's favorite, "The Carnival of Venice," a Harry James record, was played almost incessantly until it was unfortunately dropped and broken by Ensign Cripps, on communications watch at the time. It was darkly assumed that no accident was involved here, and the incident merely served as one more mark against one-way Cripps. Perhaps it had been done as a sort of revenge, for it was Ensign Cripps who felt that part of the noontime happy hour should be devoted to news broadcasts. Jensen bolted his food below, or carried what he could back up to the bridge with him, to avoid this catastrophe. After all, if you were fighting the war, you certainly should not be required to listen to reports about it.
Besides, the younger boys wanted to dance. When chow had been downed, the tables were folded back and the boys jitter bugged in the open space. There were rather stern rules about changing roles: no one wanted to have to follow all the time, since the lead partner was apt to be rather more violent with a male partner than he would have been with a girl. Once, in being propelled backward in a spin, Billy Becker had cracked his head so hard against an upright that he was forced to lie down until he stopped seeing stars.
In the evenings, a passion for writing love letters swept the ship. Now that Boston and its women lay behind them, purer thoughts turned toward the girls back home. In the language of the Ajax a girl was not the same as a woman. A girl was somebody whom you might marry someday; a woman was a very different kettle offish. Almost every man had a girl somewhere. He carried her photograph in his wallet, usually taken in a bathing suit squinting into the sun, and on occasion these photographs were exchanged for inspection, with certain solemn rules of imposed behavior. When you looked at the picture of a man's girl, you did not smile. Especially, you did not whistle. You examined the picture carefully and quietly, and then you returned it, your expression a grave blend of awe, respect and repressed envy.
The writing of love letters was, in some ways, a communal affair. Many of the boys turned to young Turnbull, the storekeeper striker, who possessed not only a happy felicity of phrase but also a dog-eared copy of How to Write Love Letters, by Cordelia Wither-spoon, with appropriate chapter divisions under such headings as "How to Patch Up a Quarrel," "How to Write to a Girl Already Spoken For by Another," "How to Profess Undying Love from a Distance." Particularly skillful letters were passed from hand to hand, and in the warm, crowded after crew's quarters, under the bleak, overhead lights, the young lovers would sit perspiring in their skivvie shirts, and laboriously, with frowning, intent faces, copy out passages from the letters of others (being warned profanely not to crease them or leave fingerprints or drop perspiration on them) for letters of their own.
Doctor Claremont, except for the required hours of sick call, rarely came to the sick bay, and then his attitude was purely technical and remote. He played chess in the wardroom with Lieutenant (jg) Arthur Palazzo, the first lieutenant of the ship's organization, and the only officer on board with whom Doctor Claremont shared any friendship. It was a curious friendship, between two men very unlike each other, but perhaps they were brought together because both men, although for different reasons, maintained a certain detachment from the other men on board.
Doctor Claremont was detached because of his loneliness and his concern for his wife, alone with her first pregnancy, and also because he felt that he might have been assigned a more useful place in time of war. He could never adapt himself to the alien life at sea. Lieutenant Palazzo, on the other hand, found shipboard life at sea so familiar that it never occurred to him to examine it at all, or to look at the men who shared it with him. He was a fine specimen of a young man, with an excellent appetite and nerves of steel, to whom the men beneath him were merely faceless numbers in a division. The routine work of the ship went forward under McNulty and Chief Kronsky, while Lieutenant Palazzo was content for the most part to sit in the wardroom and play chess or drink coffee with Doctor Claremont.
Two days out of Boston, Ensign Cripps came down with the embarrassment of measles, and Tyler Williams was assigned to care for him. Ensign Cripps was quarantined in the small sea cabin on the bridge, to prevent the outbreak of a general epidemic. Young Cripps was bored and lonely in his quarantine, but even if he had been permitted visitors it was doubtful if anyone would have come. As he explained to Williams, looking with distaste at the tray of food Williams had brought to him, the other officers were interested only in cards and women, or women and cards, and how could he talk about books or anything interesting with them?
Williams was careful not to rise to this. Under ordinary circumstances he would have taken up this attempt by Cripps to alleviate his boredom. Cripps was a so-called ninety-day wonder; he had been given his commission out of an Eastern college after ninety days of Navy training. He was an open-faced, friendly young man, who might have been one of Williams' own students. Tom Cripps had once come upon Williams reading Walden in the sick bay, and when they had talked briefly about books the familiar student-teacher relationship had suddenly come into being, and Williams had seen on Cripps' face that young, open curiosity, like a well waiting to be filled. But Williams had resisted any further overtures of friendship, and he resisted this one now, for neither of them could have handled a friendly relationship after Cripps was well again.
A friendship between an officer and an enlisted man was untenable. It had been explained to Williams again and again in his training days that this rigidly enforced distinction was not based on snobbery or class distinction (although Williams privately liked to amend this to not merely snobbery or class distinction), but had its reason in the unarguable premise that in times of action and emergency, instant, unthinking obedience must be expected of enlisted men by their officers, and if the line of demarcation was not always firmly held, if it was relaxed for a moment, this might weaken the whole fabric of command.
"What do you think of Kafka?" Cripps asked, stirring restlessly on his rumpled bunk, looking up at Williams with his earnest, pock-marked face.
"I don't think of Kafka much these days, sir," Williams said, pouring a glass of water from a pitcher, and handing him a pill.
"Oh, come off it," Cripps said, tossing the pill into his mouth like a peanut. "I'm bored in this cell. Talk to me."
"Yes, sir," Williams said. "What shall I say, sir?"
"Oh, go to hell," Ensign Cripps said, turning, and thumping his pillow with his list.
On the following afternoon another overture of friendship came from a very different and surprising quarter. While Williams was alone in the sick bay, "Red" Sullivan, the captain's yeoman, came in and settled down for a chat. Williams was a little guarded at first, thinking there might be a revival, here, of the Bullitt plot, but Sullivan's manner was so casual and indirect that Williams dismissed this idea from his mind after a few moments. Apparently Sullivan, a matter-of-fact young man, had accepted Williams' refusal to take any part in the scheme.