“Thank you,” said Rosemary. “I’m glad we poor country folk occasionally think of—”
“Still,” cut in Georgina, “I bet I’m right about Willie.”
“Who?” asked Richard, looking up from his newspaper. He had thought she said, “William.”
“That boy-Williams.”
“Wilkins,” Rosemary corrected her.
“He’s got the hots for you, Rosey.”
Richard Spence’s paper shot away from him. “What a vulgar expression. Insulting people, is it? Is that what you’re learning up there?”
“Oh really, Daddy. It’s just an expression—”
“Yes, and I don’t care for it.”
There was another long, strained silence.
“Well,” said Georgina finally, “and how about this Robert Brentwood? Bit sudden, Rosey, you sly fox. When do I get to meet him?”
“Excuse me,” said Rosemary, pushing her chair back from the table, brushing her lips quickly with the napkin.
“I only wanted to—” began Georgina. Richard Spence folded the newspaper neatly, ran his hand down the crease, and taking his reading glasses off, rubbed his eyes. “I thought you had grown out of it, Georgina.”
“Out of what?”
“Don’t be obtuse. Your willful aggressiveness. You’re not happy until you push people to the edge. God knows where you get it from.” He looked hard at her. “Why do you do it?”
Georgina said nothing, holding her teacup like a communicant’s chalice, staring ahead.
“Is it because,” Richard said, “you think we don’t — care for you?”
“Care?” said Georgina, her tone defensively hostile as she turned on him. “You can’t even say the word, can you?”
“Your mother and I have never made any distinction—”
“The word’s love, Daddy. Or was that just for William?”
“You astound me.”
“Really?”
“What, pray, is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve always known it, of course,” she said bitterly, putting the cup down hard.
“Known what?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Father,” she said, vigorously folding and refolding her napkin on the table. “Rosey’s always had your heart.”
“Do you think—”
“I know,” cut in Georgina. “Ever since we were children. I’m not being churlish about it. It’s merely an observation anyone could—”
“I’ve always cared for you. Your mother and—”
“If,” said Georgina slowly, a tension clearly crackling in her voice, “you say cared once more, I’ll scream!”
The phone was ringing, and as Richard Spence got up to answer it, Georgina avoided his distracted gaze, her eyes brimming with tears. She heard her father only vaguely, yet despite her hurt, could tell that something was terribly wrong.
“I’ll tell her,” she could hear him say. “Yes. Yes. Thank you for calling.” He put down the receiver slowly and, turning, called for Rosemary.
“She’s gone out,” said Georgina, holding her teacup in both hands, elbows on the table, something Richard Spence could not abide.
“Where?” he asked her.
“I’ve no idea,” said Georgina.
Richard Spence went to the hall and opened the closet, taking out his mackintosh and gum boots. “If your mother asks, tell her I’ve gone looking for her.”
“What’s wrong?”
Her father scooped the keys from the hall stand, put on his deerstalker, and was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Aboard the Roosevelt, submariner Evans had been silenced. Forever. Yet even in death he seemed to be screaming, his face an agony frozen in time, the cheek beneath his left eye swollen so that the eye was little more than a slit, the left side of his face appearing longer than his right, his mouth agape, right eye open and staring. His whole expression was one of terror, paralyzed before the second of impact. The bosun who had aided Robert Brentwood in giving the seaman the shot of Valium to quieten him down was trying to make sure the hospital corpsman had given him the correct dosage. Maybe the corpsman, unwell himself at the time, had somehow given him a larger dose than he meant to give him. But the corpsman shook his head, his tone adamant.
“No way, José. I didn’t give you an overdose. Don’t pin it on me. Here—” He turned away, trying to abort a sneeze-unsuccessfully. He took down the sick bay clipboard, tapping the day’s entry with his Vicks inhaler. “There it is, Chief. Twenty milligrams. You signed for it.”
“Then what the hell—” began the bosun, the corpsman using the inhaler to dismiss the bosun’s question.
“Who knows? Could’ve had a stroke. Heart attack. Combination of factors.”
“Skipper thinks he killed him.”
Despite his fever, the corpsman, though looking across at the bosun with rheumy eyes, still managed an air of a professional clinician. “Natural psychological reaction. Skipper’s not used to doing it.”
“Yeah, well, anybody kick off after you’ve given them a shot?”
“No.” The corpsman stared at him, then shifted his gaze to Evans, pulling back the sheet by the government-issue tag. “By the look of him — I’d say he died of fright. Pink elephants. Sure as hell didn’t die of a cold.”
“What the hell you mean?”
“Delirium tremens. Like I told you before. That’s where pink elephants come from.”
“Stop jerking me around.”
“Listen,” said the corpsman, sticking the Vicks inhaler into his nostril, one finger flattening the other nostril as he took a deep breath, “I’m telling you, Chief. Alcoholics who’re forced dry see more than pink elephants.”
The bosun remembered Evans screaming about snakes. Maybe the corpsman was right. “But I thought the Valium was supposed to calm him. Take the edge off?”
“Not enough,” said the corpsman. “Once you’ve flipped out, normal dose doesn’t do much for you. I could’ve told the old man that.”
“Why the hell didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“Shit, you weren’t there. Back here sittin’ on your ass.”
“Listen, man, I was pushing a one oh five.”
“What?”
“Temperature. Fever — or hadn’t you noticed?” With that, the corpsman took a thermometer from its sheath, glanced at it, shook the mercury column down before slipping it under his tongue. “ ‘Sides, I thought it best to keep away from everyone. It’s one mother of a virus.”
The corpsman, thermometer sticking out like a small cigarette from his mouth, looked down at his watch.
“Then,” said the bosun, pulling the sheet back over Evans’s face before they took him to a forward food freezer, “what the hell did kill Evans?”
The bosun has his thumb on the intercom button and asked someone to come up and help him with the corpse. Looking at Evans, still puzzled, he told the hospital corpsman, “You know, they say that flu in 1918 killed more guys than the war did.” He thought the hospital corpsman was going to bite the thermometer clean in half.
The bosun had merely meant it to take a little wind out of the corpsman’s sails, but later, when he entered the Roosevelt’s redded-out control room, which smelled like an auto showroom, unlike the disinfected sick bay, he saw the officer of the deck, First Mate Peter Zeldman, standing forward of Brentwood, directly behind the planesman’s console, and asked him if any of the crew on watch had gone off sick, reported a fever. But he didn’t get his answer, the sonar operator cutting in, “We have an unclassified surface vessel-five thousand yards. Closing.”