“Speaking.”
“Mrs. Dunning, this is Lieutenant Davis down here at SUBLANT calling to let you know that Commander Dunning has been assigned to a special operation, beginning immediately. As you know, it will be difficult for him to speak with anyone outside the base. You may of course call here anytime, and we’ll do our best to let you know how long he’s going to be. But for the moment, he’s terribly busy — he’ll try to call you tonight.”
Jo Dunning had had a few conversations like this before, and she knew better than to probe. She was so anxious about Christmas, however — which would be their first together for three years — that she asked the question directly.
“Will he be home in a few days?”
“No, ma’am.”
Her heart fell. “How long, Lieutenant?”
“Right now, he’s expected to return toward the end of January. We’re looking at a five-week window.”
“A five-week widow,” she murmured. And then, “Thank you, Lieutenant. Please tell my husband I’ll be thinking of him.”
“I certainly will, ma’am.”
“Oh, Lieutenant, are you going with him?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell him to drive carefully, won’t you?”
“I sure will, ma’am.”
At which point Jo Dunning put the phone down and wept. Just as she had wept last summer when all of their plans were ruined because of another operation at the end of the world down in the South Atlantic. Except she had not known at the time where he was.
And as she sat now in her father-in-law’s wooden rocking chair, staring out at the sunlit waters of Cotuit Bay, she could think only of the terrible, deep waters in which she knew her husband worked, and the monstrous, black seven-thousand-ton nuclear killing machine of which Boomer Dunning was the acknowledged master. No one, in all of military history, had ever hated anything quite so badly as the lovely Jo Dunning loathed the United States Navy at this particular moment. Her tears were tears of desolation. And fear. No one ever said it, but everyone even remotely connected with the submarine service knew the dangers and the anxiety that pervaded every family whose father, son, or brother helped to operate America’s big, underwater strike force.
It was not that she couldn’t cope with it. Jo thought she could cope with anything, even, if it came to it, the death of her husband in the service of their country. It was only the hateful unfairness of it all. Why Boomer, why her wonderful sailor-husband, and not someone else? But she already knew the answer to that. She’d been told often enough. Because he was the best. And one day he was going to be a captain, and then an admiral, and then, who knows, she said aloud, “President of the Universe for all I care.”
Jo composed herself quickly. At thirty-eight, she still looked perfect, and she was still dewy-eyed over her husband. She adored even the sight of him in uniform, this handsome, commanding man, about a half inch taller than six feet, blond hair, massive arms and tree trunk legs. Boomer looked like what he was: an ocean-racing yachtsman when he had the chance, a man who was an America’s Cup-class sailor, a true son of the sea. His father had been very much the same but had left the Navy after World War II, as a lieutenant commander, and proceeded to make a great deal of money with a Boston stockbroking firm.
Jefferson Dunning was close to eighty years of age and was busily spending some of it wintering on a Caribbean Island. But he had deeded the house on the Cape to Boomer years previously, in order to skate around heavy Massachusetts inheritance taxes. Boomer was a better sailor than his father had been, just, but was not as financially astute. He would have no need to be. He would inherit a reasonable amount of money, and Jo herself would one day share with her two sisters the legacy of the family boatyard up in New Hampshire.
She was a curious dichotomy, Mrs. Boomer Dunning. A lifelong dinghy sailor, she was an ace racing the local Cotuit skiffs, and she could handle any powerboat around. She’d been doing that all of her life. Jo was, however, a lousy driver. Which was why at this moment the Boston Whaler was jammed into the side of the Dunning garage. Jo judged water distance better than land distance.
She was never really comfortable amid the glitz of the acting trade, although her looks might have carried her far. She had quite enjoyed living in New York and attending acting classes. But her first television soap opera part had been, well, a bit wooden. The Hollywood producer who had once written of Fred Astaire, “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a bit,” would probably have remained unimpressed had he studied the young Jo Donaghue in screen action.
She had a couple more chances, including another soap, which ran for eight weeks, after which things went quiet. At twenty-three, she was going nowhere. In the spring of 1988 she was introduced to a young Navy lieutenant at a yacht club dance in Maine. Cale Dunning had just crewed on a big ketch up from the Chesapeake. He was from Cape Cod, and they were married within five months, just before he decided to spend his career in the submarine service.
Even now, on this sunny but now depressing Saturday morning, Jo would not have traded one day of her life as Mrs. Dunning for the leading role in any movie. All she wanted was for him to come home for Christmas. And that was not going to happen.
Their own house was in Groton, Connecticut, near the big US submarine base, New London. But she and their two daughters, Kathy, thirteen, and Jane, eleven, often came up to their grandparents’ Cape Cod house during the winter when it was empty. The whole family had been together here during the Thanksgiving holiday three weeks ago, and this particular weekend had been arranged for Jo to put the house in shape for Christmas next week. Now none of that would be necessary. Jo and the girls might as well stay in Groton, where there were other Naval families close by, old friends who would invite them to parties where no one would mention the absence of Commander Dunning. Special Ops were like that. They cast a cloak of secrecy over their participants, and all of those on the fringes. Jo knew she could be talking to a colleague of Boomer’s who had at least some vague idea of where Boomer was on Christmas Day, but that nothing would ever be mentioned between them. That was how it was, and she was not some skittish television actress anymore. She was the wife of a US Navy nuclear submarine commander, and she might one day be the wife of an Admiral.
Jo wandered outside to retrieve the stupid fishing rod and to work out a way to remove the Boston Whaler from the right-side garage wall without driving the Jeep into the other side. She stepped once more out into the cool bright December morning and gazed along the water, up the narrows and into North Bay. There was still some foliage left on the trees lining the opposite shore of Oyster Harbors, since it had been a warm and late fall. The reds and golds on the Cotuit side were brighter in the midmorning sunlight, and the flat, calm, empty channel out beyond the open harbor made her think, as she had many times before, that this place was indeed paradise.
The sailing boats and the fishing boats were almost all put away for the winter now, except for those that belonged to the Cotuit Oyster Company. The only sign of marine movement was the big Gillmore Marine tugboat Eileen G, now chugging quietly out of the Seapuit River, beneath the steady grip of the master dock-builder and waterman George Gillmore himself.
Soon the winter would set in here, and North Bay might freeze right over, and docks might move in the ice. George Gillmore would soon be working overtime to protect the waterfront bulkheads and piers all around these bays. The high winds would swing in from the Canadian northwest, and snow would cover the summer gardens, and the spring would be cold, and wet, and late coming. But the weather neither inspired nor depressed Jo Dunning. She considered this place to be paradise in wind, rain, or shine. And rarely a day went by without her thinking of the years she and Boomer would have here together when, finally, he retired from the Navy.