And yet my May had chosen him to wed.
The scouts had found us a nice flow of cold water in the deeps south of the Philippines, and that is always a great treasure. Every extra degree of differential between surface temperature and deep makes a great enhancement in power yield when you work with such short margins as ours. So we were thousands of kilometers west of Hawaii, and yet it was well dark before May and her gallant called me back. I was sitting on my private little weather deck, gazing at the Southern Cross and wishing I had been born a couple of decades later than I was, when the phone rang.
There they were, the two of them. His arm was around her shoulder, and he was grinning at me with that twisted- but not evil-face, and May was looking apologetic but ecstatic. "It has all gone so very fast, Uncle Jason. She had never called me "uncle before. "I wanted to call you a thousand times, but-
"It doesn't matter," I said, lying.
"You will come to the wedding, though, won't you? Please?
As though there were any doubt of that! But the boy added his pleas as well. "You're the only real family May has, sir. None of her young men had ever called me "sir before, either. "My mother says she'll try to be her mother, too, since I never had a sister, and heaven knows, sir, I'll do all I can to make her happy! And it wouldn't be right to marry May if you weren't here.
The statute of limitations had expired long since, of course, but there was nothing I wanted on land. Even on an island. Especially an island belonging to the Appermoys. But he added the clincher: "You really have to, sir, because we want you to give her away.
And I gave her away.
I gave her away on the steps of the mansion at South Point, with Kilauea steaming behind the house, with a lei around May's sweet neck and the priest wearing a microphone in his collar so that all the fourteen hundred guests could hear, and Betsy grinning wickedly at me from the first row, and the groom white-faced and sweating, for he had had some kind of convulsion just before the ceremony. He had good enough manners, young Frank Appermoy. But I did not want to give May away to any man, with good manners or bad, rich or poor, young or old, as long as that man was not me. Especially not to one who, as I learned, every now and then had blinding headaches and convulsions. I wish that horse had kicked a little harder.
Whether they were happy or not I do not know.. I suppose they were. The next year they had a baby, James Reginald Appermoy, and the year after that young Frank's scrambled brain quit trying to keep him alive and my May was a widow at twenty-two. The bitch mother-in-law said she killed him.
At one and twenty to a husband was wed. At two and twenty the husband was dead. Her mother, no mother, called her no wife. Her sister, no sister, plagued all of her life. Her living was bounded in snares and guiles, The sweet, luckless queen of the grazing isles.
May could not stay on the Big Island with the old Appermoy woman spreading scandalous tales about her. Ben the bastard invited her home. Not to the boat she had grown up on, because her old home there had become part of the new electrolysis plant, but to the homes on the biggest of the new oaty-boats. Two million deadweight tons! The oaties weren't boats anymore, they were floating islands, and there was room for a dozen large families in owner's country on the foredeck. In spite of this, Ben claimed at first that there was no room for me, but that was only to make May beg. "Oh, well, he said, giving in as he had planned to all along, "at least he can change the baby's diapers. I'll find him quarters with the crew.
Quarters with the crew. And I custodian of May's vast estate and a part owner in my own right, with my fifty shares. May owned three Fleet shares to bastard Ben's one, but they did us little good. For Ben had the will, and control of the voting rights until she reached the age of thirty. I could not believe the Commodore had been so insane. Yet when I slipped away to Reykjavik and spoke to a lawyer at the Sea court, he told me the will was firm, and I went back to May with a shifty lie about where I had been and watched her nurse the child. I did not know what to say to her.
But May did not ask. In those first months she was all for the child, singing to him, petting him, nursing him- wincing now and then, for he was a terrible biter. And a terribly ugly little brat, too. May would sit by the great oval pool among the palms on the foredeck with Jimmy Rex in her arms or whimpering in a bed beside her; and I would be there to give her company; and surely, almost every time, there would be Betsy as well, practicing her dives off the high board or sipping mai tais with one of the corrupt, pretty young men who were always her houseguests. And always with one eye on May and the child.
It was easy to know what Betsy wanted. Whatever May had, that was it. She had even wanted that sorry, spasmed Frank Appermoy-and had got him, at least long enough for a tumble in his water bed, and made sure I knew she had. Now she wanted Appermoy's child. At first I thought all she wanted was a child. She could have had one easily enough, with all those young studs sniffing after her; I thought what stopped her was, a little, the bother of marrying one of them or, most of all, the unpleasantness and pain of actually giving birth. In that I was wrong. What she wanted was James Reginald Appermoy, with all his tantrums and colics, and only because he was May's.
So for half a year May was the perfect young mother bereft, with the imperfect wretch of a babe. Then the brat was weaned, and she seemed to come back to the world. Perhaps she realized at last that she was lonely. She had no friend but me on the oaty-boat. If anyone in the huge seven-thousand-man crew showed signs of becoming a friend, Betsy told Ben, and Ben transferred him away. Even the four other Mays could come on board only for a day or two at a time, with all the long flight to get there and the other to leave again, for we were mostly far from any land. So it was no wonder that my sweet girl began to look elsewhere for pleasure. It was a house party here, and a fox hunt there, and Switzerland for the skiing, and Tokyo to see the shows. If she was to be away for just a few days, she would leave Jimmy Rex with me, nasty child whom I tried with all my heart to love. If it was a matter of weeks they would both be gone, and I had nothing to do and no one to do it with, for my friends were suddenly needed badly on another boat as well. I wished for another Elsie Van Dorn, but Elsie herself was now a second engineer on the old boat, and I did not want to involve her in Ben's anger. So I had a succession of cooks' assistants and young things from the typing pool. None lasted more than a few weeks. The ones who were not kind enough and strong enough to put up with the brat I had to send back to their regular work, and the others Ben transferred away.
And the unsigned messages came in. One a month. Some came from Australia and some from Seoul, and one from Capetown, but they all said much the same thing:
"If you value your life, help her now.
But how was I to do that?
I did not need the unknown assassin's reminder to want to help my May. I made an excuse to slip away again and this time found a better lawyer, or at least a- more high- priced one. He did not simply tell me the Commodore's will could not be broken. He gave me two days of his time, quoting the Law of the Sea and citing precedents. He charged accordingly, and it all came out to much the same. Ben had the law on his side until May was thirty.