“Of course, I don’t believe a word of it, Laura. Nobody could who knows Rich even a little bit. But I thought you ought to know what they’re saying…” Peggy’s voice was pitched low, barely audible. “Most people won’t tell you this sort of thing,” she said. “That’s why a good friend … that’s why I felt I had to …” again she let her voice trail off.
Beware the bearer of evil rumor under the guise of friendship! There lies the quicksand! Peggy herself might have revived that old story. But why? What does she want? If she wants my help in her campaign to get Keith out of the Navy, this is not the way to go about it. I’ll not help her after this. All I want is just to get her out of here. Far away from here. Maybe that’s it. Get her out of New London, out of the Navy, that is, and Keith too, of course. But that’s stupid. She’s a stupid woman. This conversation is insane. Maybe she’s not right in the head. I’m the wife of her husband’s senior officer. I don’t have to listen to this drivel. Especially day after day, as I have. How to turn her around without activating her implicit threat? How to stop her without risking the intensification of rumor, the spreading, even the creation, of destructive, titillating gossip? Can she have the slightest idea of how harmful this could be to Rich, at this time of all times, with an admiral’s selection board in the offing?
She must. Obviously, she must. This must be her game. But it won’t hurt much if it comes only from Peggy. More people than I must know her for what she’s turned out to be. Cool head. Don’t show that it stings. Play it down. Don’t let her see how she has suddenly scared you. Don’t give her anything she can use. What to say?
“Don’t worry yourself about any of that idle talk, Peggy. Rich and I have heard it all, and so has the rest of the Navy. It doesn’t amount to anything. Commodore Blunt’s death” (for some obscure reason she felt his title should be attached to his name) “grieved Rich deeply. That’s why he decided to bring him back to Pearl instead of burying him at sea the usual way.” That’s enough. Now get off the subject. “And don’t concern yourself about Joan Lastrada, either. She’s a fine person, and a good friend of both of ours.” Enough of that subject, too. There’s sufficient truth in what she knows or guesses to keep the gossip mills grinding endlessly. Even Rich doesn’t know what I know, and I may never tell him. “But I can’t influence Rich’s official Navy actions, about Keith or anything else. He wouldn’t let me if I tried. What Keith does is only his business, and yours, of course.” Best hand her this placebo. “He’ll have plenty of chances to talk all this over with Rich if he wants to after the Cushing gets back from this trip. Keith will have to bring it up, though. Rich sure won’t. He feels very strongly about this sort of thing. If Keith wants to talk about it, he’ll tell him the very best he knows and thinks. But it will be up to Keith.”
“But you will speak to Rich, so he’ll know what Keith’s thinking.” It was an assertion of fact, not a question. “Keith sets a lot of store by his advice. This will be a very big decision for him.” Peggy was still looking at her with intensity. There was something she was trying to project without saying it. Laura could only interpret her manner as a nervous challenge.
With a decisive motion, Laura rose to her feet. “I’ll tell him what you’ve told me. What he does about it is up to him. He’ll be home in half an hour, and now I’ve got to get ready.” Peggy remained seated. Would a stronger hint of dismissal be needed? But Laura was saved from the necessity by the sight of a familiar auto entering their driveway. “Rich is home early,” she said with a mild note of surprise.
A moment later he came in through the back door, and she knew something was wrong, that he was upset to see Peggy, that, whatever it was, it would preoccupy him all evening to the exclusion of everything else, and that if it had to do with naval operational matters, he would tell her nothing.
The slight bustle attendant upon Peggy’s departure provided a respite. Laura could sense his urgency for her guest to leave, hoped Peggy did not. “What’s the matter?” she said as soon as they were alone.
“Nothing that we can’t fix, I hope,” he said. “That’s why I came home early. There’s nothing I can do on the Proteus right now, but there may be later tonight. I’ll probably have to spend the night aboard, so I’ll throw a few things in a suitcase…”
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
Rich’s answer was proof that he could not. “What were you and Peggy Leone talking about?” he asked. To Laura’s sensitive antennas, tuned as she was to her husband’s sometimes uncommunicative moods, there was the slightest — barely the slightest — emphasis on Peggy’s married name, almost as though Peggy were the last person in the world he had expected, or wanted, to see.
“Just girl talk,” Laura said lightly. “She’s not been over for some time, so I asked her to stop by for a drop of tea.” Sometime soon, Laura knew, she would need to discuss the problem of Peggy and Keith, but now was not the time. There was a familiar look of concentration on his face, a preoccupation she had experienced often enough to have evolved her own method of dealing with it. Then intuition flooded her mind. “Is something the matter with Keith and the Cushing?” she said before she could stop herself.
The look on Rich’s face told her she had hit close to the mark. It also told her to ask no more.
It was quite dark as Richardson parked his car in the designated space near the Proteus’ forward gangway. He had succumbed to Laura’s suggestion of a hastily prepared supper before returning. The lights of the submarine tender were blazing brilliantly, especially those associated with her machine shop and the submarine service areas. The cargo entry ports had large soft lights rigged on a small boom projecting out over them, casting a diffused yet penetrating glow around the area. Similar lights were burning on the other side, where the submarines lay, encasing the entire ship and the sleek low-lying hulls she mothered with a small cocoon of brilliance which fought unsuccessfully against the surrounding night. From the distance, as his car approached New London’s State Pier, alongside which the tender was moored, Richardson was conscious of the general impression that the entire combined structure of tender, submarines and dock area was magically incandescent. As he approached, however, the lights divided into their individual sources, each causing the outlines of a portion of the component structure of the ship, the covered dock on one side and the submarines on the other, to stand out against the pressure of the supervening blackness as though, somehow, each possessed its own internal source of light instead of being only a reflection.
It did not seem real. There was a mystery to the entire scene. Proteus was moored bow in, the customary way. Her masts disappeared into nothingness overhead, her hull stretched out to nothingness alongside the deck. The submarines on her starboard side floated on nothing — which reflected shimmering light in certain places — and the sleek superstructures rising from their rounded hulls had their own forests of shiny retractable masts extending upward into black nothingness.
Reflections from the slab-sided Proteus and the rounded hulls of the submarines contrasted strongly with the dullness of the large wooden warehouse which dominated the pier. Yet, though the profusion of luminescence seemed to spring from inexhaustible energy, and the large lights glowed everywhere, it was not enough to drive the blackness very far. It hovered above, on both sides, and ahead and astern. It seemed poised to close back in, and its gloominess seized Richardson as he approached the accommodation ladder, returned the sentry’s salute at its foot, and heard Proteus’ loudspeaker system announce his arrivaclass="underline" “Squadron Ten! Squadron Ten!” Slowly, his suitcase in his left hand, he climbed the twenty-seven varnished steps to the gangway opening in the ship’s rail. Buck Williams, alerted by the speaker, was waiting.