Cates admitted she had a point. To tell the truth, he was a little relieved. He was barely nineteen and just starting his Coast Guard career. He didn’t particularly feel like embarking upon a marital career at the same time, not to mention a paternal one. So he told Celeste the best thing they could do would be to seek an abortion, and she told him she had already checked with a couple of the girls in the line and one of them said she knew a very good woman who did a lot of theatrical work and who could take care of this for three hundred dollars. By this time Celeste was three months pregnant, which made it all seem very fair, a hundred dollars for each month. The only trouble was that Cates and Celeste had been living somewhat extravagantly on his fifty-four dollars a month seaman-first-class salary and her forty dollars a week earned as a dancer-cum-drink hustler. They barely had thirty dollars between them, let alone three hundred. Cates got off a wire to his folks back in Overall Patches, Iowa, saying SEND ME THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS AT ONCE I AM IN DIFFICULTY WILL EXPLAIN LATER. The return wire said THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS ARE YOU KIDDING EXPLAIN NOW. Cates did not explain then — or ever, for that matter. Instead, he went to Celeste and assured her he would rustle up the three hundred dollars somehow, somewhere, just give him a little time, after all he was just about to take the quartermaster test, and he was studying and
Celeste looked into her lover’s eyes and wisely saw neither solvency, solution, nor salvation in them. “Okay,” she said, “do your best, Nat,” and then she went to the owner of the club where she worked and asked him for a three-hundred-dollar advance on her salary, which he gave her at ten per cent interest. The next weekend she got rid of the baby. She called Cates in Boston to tell him it had all been taken care of, and he said something like “Oh gee, that’s great, baby. I passed the test, I’m a quartermaster third. Wait’ll you see my rating patch.”
Celeste never got around to seeing Cates’s rating patch, nor did Cates ever get an opportunity to show it to her, because the next time he went to her apartment her landlady told him she had moved. When he went over to the club, he discovered she was not in the line any more. One of the girls said she had gone to San Francisco with a drummer from the Cotton Club band, who had paid off her debt to the owner. All Cates could think of to ask was “A colored drummer?”
In July of 1938 he was taken off the cutter with his quartermaster rating and sent to the buoy depot in Portsmouth, Virginia. The thing that troubled him all during his two years there, the thing that continued to trouble him after he was transferred onto a buoy tender and promoted to quartermaster second, the thing that bothered him constantly all during the war when he served aboard a Navy AKA, making chief quartermaster in 1945, and finally marrying a girl from Norfolk, Virginia, where he was stationed on weather patrol, the thing that annoyed him constantly was the certain knowledge that he had done something wrong back there — but he didn’t know just what the hell it was.
She had said she didn’t want to get married, hadn’t she?
He had offered, he had told her he would marry her as soon as he got permission, but she had said she wanted to be a dancer. He could remember those were her exact words, because he had corrected her like a goddamn jackass; he had said, “You mean a showgirl, don’t you?” and she had said, “Well, yes, if that’s what you want to call it.” Was that the mistake he’d made? He’d tried to get the money, he’d honestly tried. He’d wired his folks — fat chance of getting anything there in Hayseed, Iowa — and then he’d begun borrowing from every friend of his on the ship and had managed to raise a hundred and thirty-two dollars, but by that time Celeste had called to say it was all taken care of.
“What do you mean?” he’d said on the phone.
“The baby. You know.”
“Well, when—”
“Last week. It’s all taken care of.”
“Well, that’s great, honey,” he’d said. “Hey, I’ll be coming in week after next. Wait’ll you see my patch.”
Late in 1947, Nathaniel Cates entered OCS and emerged from it four months later as an ensign in the United States Coast Guard. Now, at forty-four, he was a lieutenant commander, his hair still brown, his figure somewhat paunchier than it had been back in 1938, his face showing the puffiness of a man who had been drinking gin since 1936 when he was only seventeen. His wife, Helen, was forty-two, a slight blond woman with fine bones and beautiful brown eyes. (Celeste’s hair was black, her eyes were green, there was an Irish sauciness in the switch of her backside, there was a wild promise in her legs, she was the only real woman he had ever known in his life.) His son was sixteen years old and hoped one day to enter the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. His daughter was fourteen; she had won a French medal during her sophomore year in high school. (Tell me about Tantamount, Celeste said. There’s nothing to tell. There’s a gas station and a store and railroad tracks running through, that’s all. Oh, you poor dear baby coming from such a dead town. Kiss me, you hear? Kiss me, baby, I’ll take you out of that horrid little town. Kiss me, baby, I’ll take you where you’ve never never been before.) He had served aboard a 125-footer until June of 1949 when he’d made j.g. Then the Korean War broke out, and he had worked picking up Navy DEs in Green Cove Springs, Florida, ferrying them to the Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay, Maryland, near Baltimore, and then across the Pacific to Hawaii where he was stationed until 1953. (When I’m dancing, I feel like I could fly, do you know what I mean, Nat? I feel as if I can kick my legs higher than anybody in the world, that I can kick them right up to the ceiling, the sky! Look at me, baby, I’m flying!) In 1955, Nathaniel Cates made full lieutenant and was assigned to a buoy tender as executive officer. Three years later he was sent to Miami as executive officer of the base on MacArthur Causeway. He did not earn his lieutenant commander’s stripes until April of 1960, and shortly after that he was given command of the Mercury.
He still did not know what the hell he had done wrong back in 1938.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Cates turned. For a moment he looked at the man standing before him without recognizing him, and then realized it was one of his electronics technicians. Quickly he said, “Yes?”
“Captain, shore tie’s broken for water and electricity, and the telephones are all aboard,” the technician said.
“Very well,” Cates said. He turned to his talker, who was wearing sound-powered phones and gazing blankly off to starboard. “Take in three and four,” he said.
“Fantail, bridge,” the talker said. “Take in three and four.”
Cates waited. In a moment the talker said, “Number three aboard, sir.”
“Very well.”
“Number four aboard, sir.”
“Very well, take in number one.”
“Forecastle, bridge,” the talker said, “take in number one.”
Cates glanced at the clock on the after bulkhead. It read 0904.
“Number one aboard, sir,” the talker said.
“Very well,” Cates answered. “Left standard rudder.”
“Left standard rudder,” the helmsman replied.
“Starboard engine ahead one-third.”
“Starboard engine ahead one-third, sir,” the engine order telegraph operator said, and in a moment added, “Engine room answers starboard engine ahead one-third, sir.”
“Very well,” Cates said.