It was too much for the boys. They yelled and booed with delight, for they darkly suspected that the place of honor where their pictures hung on the bedroom walls of their girls at home was shared also by pictures of the face before them. They screamed, "Oh, Frankie!" in falsetto tones. They clutched one another in mock embrace. They swooned in the aisle.
Seated on a bench beside Williams, Bullitt looked with remote distaste at Billy Becker and young Stanley, who, scuffling and embracing, had fallen into the aisle at his feet. "Mercy," he said, "I must speak to the purser in the morning about our seats."
Overhead, on routine flight, a reconnaissance plane moved like a dark star among bright stars, all mocked by the flickering patch of lighted screen, while the vast tropical night was filled with a soaring song of love.
The next day was Sunday, the second day of Stewart Brown's confinement. Williams went down to him at dinnertime with some concern. Brown had eaten nothing since the sentence was passed. He drank quantities of water, but Williams would always find the bread untouched, spurned with a stubborn pride. At dinner that evening they had been given a fresh apple for dessert, and Williams smuggled one down to Brown inside his shirt, after a thoughtful weighing of his two responsibilities, his duty to obey orders and his role as spiritual comforter. Surely a single apple might be considered more spiritually comforting than physically sustaining. But Brown spurned that, too. He was standing with his back against the wall of his cell, his arms crossed, regarding his feet. Williams sent the guard to the water fountain with Brown's mug, and then he offered the apple through the barred door; Brown looked at it without any change of expression, and he did not unfold his arms. "Take it," Williams said. "But eat the core, too, so you won't be found out."
"No, thanks," Brown said, coldly, Williams put the apple back inside his shirt, and when the guard returned he went up to the deck again.
In the sick bay, Doctor Claremont was examining Kerensky's throat. That afternoon, with no maneuvers scheduled, a baseball game had been organized ashore, the officers and chiefs against the enlisted men. This was standard practice, with the generally predictable outcome based on the premise that it was probably better to have the enlisted men win. Doctor Claremont, watching from the sidelines, had seen Kerensky seized with a fit of coughing after sliding in to home base. He had asked him to come to the sick bay for examination at evening sick call.
Kerensky had come to the sick bay before, with an extremely sore throat. Doctor Claremont had said then that the tonsils should be removed, but not while the throat was so inflamed. (Doctor Claremont always employed the impersonal article in speaking of parts of the body, as if they existed apart from the self.)
Now, Doctor Claremont declared that Kerensky's cough was a result of the chronic infection of his tonsils, and it was imperative that they be removed. Doctor Claremont would discuss it with the captain. Since Kerensky was so vital a member of the crew it was possible that the captain would not wish him sent ashore for surgery. The operation might well be done on board, possibly on the following Sunday, while the ship was anchored and still in the bay.
This was rather surprising to Williams. Doctor Claremont, good surgeon that he was, was firmly opposed to any emergency operative procedure unless it was absolutely necessary. Williams had learned this on the trip from Norfolk to Argentia, when a young seaman named Rostal had appeared at the sick bay with the classic symptoms of appendicitis. He was doubled over with abdominal pain, his face was green with nausea, and there was acute tenderness at McBurney's point, that spot midway on an imaginary line drawn from the navel to the thigh.
This was at a time when there had been considerable publicity in the newspapers about emergency appendectomies at sea, when, as Bullitt pointed out, almost every ambitious pharmacist's mate had removed at least one appendix with a can opener, nail scissors and a rubber band. But Doctor Claremont had ordered Rostal to his bunk. An ice pack was placed on his abdomen. His temperature was taken at frequent intervals, and he was given nothing by mouth except the sip of water necessary to swallow the prescribed pheno-barbital. At the end of two days Rostal had so recovered that he persuaded Doctor Claremont not to send him ashore for operation at Argentia. He was brought back to Boston to be hospitalized.
It did not occur to Williams that Doctor Claremont's decision to operate on Kerensky might be influenced by his loneliness and boredom, just as neither one of them had any way of knowing of the tragic climax toward which this incident would be the first step. At the time the decision seemed fairly unimportant. Doctor Claremont was badly in need of diversion of some kind, and for him a tonsillectomy was as good as a night on the town, although he rationalized it in a different way when he came to discuss it in the sick bay. For a healthy boy like Kerensky it would scarcely be any inconvenience at all. He would be off the watch list for only a few days, and the captain needed him on board. Also—and this was the reason Doctor Claremont put forward with most emphasis—the experience would be of enormous future value to Williams. He hoped, in fact, as he said to Bullitt with diffidence, that the chief would stay away from the sick bay so that Williams would be completely on his own as assistant. Bullitt's reaction to this was to sniff haughtily, and to leave the sick bay without a word.
Williams passed him later, on the deck, standing at the rail. Throwing his head back in his characteristic way, so that his nose looked almost hawklike, he said, "I do hope you two will enjoy playing house together."
Brown, at Captain Thompson's order, was released the next afternoon at four o'clock. When the ship secured from maneuvers, McNulty found him below, showered and shaved and in clean dungarees, sitting on the edge of his bunk, his expressionless face held down, his hands open and lax between his knees. McNulty stood in front of him, feet braced wide, hat pushed back from his sunburned face, one thumb hooked in his belt. "Look, you stupid punk," he said, with an exaggerated roughness of tone, "I'm going to make a man out of you if it kills you. Now, come along."
McNulty usually had chow with men of his own stature, such as Kerensky or Jensen, but tonight he sat with Brown, whose pale, set face looked even paler beside McNulty's burned, impassive one. Brown did not look up or speak as he ate, and there was a suspicion of angry moisture in his eyes, but he ate ravenously —three slabs of roast beef, a mountain of mashed potatoes which he forked up with canned peas —and washed all of it down with mugs of fresh milk. Afterward, McNulty had him put on the eight-to-twelve watch list, and Stewart Brown, former captain's boy, was well on his way to becoming Stewart Brown, deck seaman.
As the week went on, every afternoon, after sick call, while the ship wheeled and turned, while the antiaircraft guns rattled, while the sick bay shook as torpedoes were launched without warheads from the tubes above them, Williams and Doctor Claremont busied themselves with preparations for the coming Sunday. Bullitt pointedly absented himself from these activities, and Williams noticed a constantly diminishing supply of alcohol.
Williams unpacked Doctor Claremont's instruments, brought up from the medical-supply room below, and as the doctor explained their uses, he seemed, almost for the first time on the cruise, to be completely happy and absorbed.
While they examined, cleaned and sterilized the instruments, they rehearsed the operation. Since this was not an operation in which the abdominal wall would be opened, the limited sterile conditions of the sick bay would not constitute a hazard, but for the sake of Williams' training they would go about the operation with every regard for technical detail. The small treatment table in the sick bay would be lowered and covered with a sterile sheet, and the surface of the nearest cabinet would also be covered with squares of sterile muslin, to enlarge the work area. Doctor Claremont and Williams would wear sterile gowns, sterile caps, sterile masks and sterile rubber gloves.