The reporter for the Chronicle who had broken the “empty cargo” story was reassigned to the obituaries.
To the other three nurses with her, Lana’s personality was something of an enigma, an odd mixture of shyness and assertiveness in her job, and working with the patients in an oddly detached way. She wasn’t unpleasant, but rather, distanced, as if somehow nursing for her was less a vocation than a refuge. It was several weeks before one of them discovered from an American newspaper that she had been the Mrs. J. T. La Roche and sister of the naval officer who, if he survived, looked like he was going to be court-martialed. This news only confirmed Lana’s fellow nurses in their intuitive belief that she was running away.
“But to a hospital?” one of them had put to the others.
“Why not? After a rotten marriage, a hospital’s as good a place as any to lose yourself for a while. Get a new perspective.”
They were right and wrong — right in that Lana had found a place to retreat, where other people’s needs forced her to leave her troubles for a while, but wrong in thinking it gave her a new perspective. The outbreak of war to Lana was but another example of people’s inhumanity to others, something she had experienced in her marriage. And she made the depressing discovery that no amount of work, no amount of depressing news from the war in Europe and in Korea, could take herself out of herself long enough to rid her of the feeling that inside she was somehow permanently contaminated, dirty, that in succumbing to Jay’s sexual demands, she’d sullied herself more than anyone could ever know. The very thought of it would start her throat constricting as if she were being suffocated, nowhere to hide, no one to help — a heart-thumping terror of suddenly losing control. In those moments she was secretly but deeply depressed. And despite the veneer of self-assurance, she realized that not even the cataclysmic possibility of nuclear war could erase an individual’s guilt.
It didn’t take Lana long to fall afoul of Matron. On one of their few days off, after Lana and a black girl from Boston had discovered their U.S. dollars were worth at least fifteen percent more in the Canadian port, the four nurses had taken a cab around to see some of the sights. One of the girls wanted to go to Fairview Cemetery on the city’s west side, where 125 people who had died on the Titanic were interred and where more than 200, some of them unrecognizable after the blast, had been killed on December 6, 1917, when a French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, on convoy to Europe, had struck a Norwegian merchantman and exploded, razing most of the buildings on the city’s northern side, killing over fifteen hundred men, women, and children and permanently injuring thousands of others. To Lana’s surprise, she found the cemetery peculiarly comforting-why, she didn’t know.
When they returned to the nurses’ quarters, they were summoned by Matron.
“I don’t want my nurses tearing around town waving dollar bills about like tarts!”
The nurses were taken aback and angry, but none of them stood up to her except Lana.
“Matron, I don’t know who could have told you that. But we were on our own time and—”
“Own?” asked Matron malevolently. “No one has their own time in a war.”
Lana didn’t answer that as yet they had seen nothing of the war. Intuitively she sensed Matron hated her for her good looks.
“Well,” Matron continued, “you’ll soon be too busy for any nonsense.” She paused for a moment, was about to turn her back on them, when she cast a steely gaze on Lana. “Mrs. La Roche, you may not be aware of it, but a great deal of unnecessary resentment can be caused by people with more money flashing it about in front of others who go without. Canadian nurses earn far less in real terms than you Americans — not nearly enough to hire taxis to roam at leisure—”
“But, Matron,” interjected one of the two Canadian nurses, “we didn’t mind spending—”
“The point I’m making is that there’ll be enough for people to gripe about once these wards start to fill, and believe me, they will. We’ll have enough to deal with without petty squabbling breaking out between Canadian and American and British servicemen about whose girl is whose and who has the most money. Don’t tell me — I’ve seen it before in—” She decided not to reveal her age. “I merely want you to act responsibly. That’s all.”
Elizabeth, the black girl from Boston, shook her head as they watched Matron walk away, heels clicking on the hard linoleum floor. Even the echoes of her sharp footsteps on the immaculately clean floor had the very sound of cold efficiency.
“I’ve been told about people like that, but I never believed they actually existed. Old bitch!”
“They exist, all right,” said one of the Canadian girls. “Can’t bear to see anyone else happy. I think she likes the war — gives purpose to her miserable existence.” Lana felt herself going red with embarrassment.
“Yes,” said the other Canadian. “They should put her on a sub, down and out of sight. Maybe if we get lucky, she’ll get torpedoed.”
“With what?” asked the girl from Maine. They were all laughing except Lana. Elizabeth suddenly bit her lip, turned, and consolingly put her arm about Lana. “Hey, I ‘m sorry, Lana. That was some dumb thing to say.”
The others had to wait for Elizabeth to explain that one of Lana’s brothers was a sub captain in the Atlantic Fleet. But Lana hadn’t been bothered by the reference to either subs or torpedoes. She was far more worried about the way she had stiffened when Elizabeth had put her arm around her. Now, even the tough of another human being trying to comfort her only raised her defenses. Had Jay destroyed her that much? she wondered, in which case her days of comforting as a nurse were surely numbered.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Via the armed services radio in Japan, news had reached the LPH Saipan that in New York a drug ring had been discovered by military police overseeing the loading of NATO supplies. Among the drugs stolen were substantial quantities of Demerol and morphine destined for the U.S. forces fighting in Europe. The news item had so upset General Douglas Freeman that he had been unable to complete his meal with the usual light banter of the officers’ mess.
The general was now looking out into the darkness from the flight deck of the Saipan, its destroyers and forward ASW helos invisible about the eighteen-thousand-ton ship.
“Know what they ought to do with them, Al?” he asked his aide. “All those junkies?”
“What’s that, sir?”
The general’s voice was made sharper by the salty wind whipping it away. “Shoot them. Like the Chinks do.” He was looking up through scattered stratus at a spill of stars twinkling over the Sea of Japan. “By God, I don’t like that Zhou bastard, but one thing those Commies know how to do is to deal with pushers and all the other scum. I find any in this outfit with glue up their goddamned nose, I’ll throw ‘em overboard.”
“Pity you haven’t had time to get to know them, General.”
“I’m well aware of that deficiency, Al. They’ll get a chance to size me up when I talk with them tonight. And I’ll get to know them well enough tomorrow. If we can hold past noon-well, we’ll make history. In, bang, and out! That’s the ticket”