Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 08 - In Dangers Path

He put the telephone in its cradle, leaned back against the cushions of the couch, and closed his eyes.

He opened them quickly and sat up when he heard the sound of a door being opened.

A young woman was walking across the sitting room toward him. She had jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy, and she was wearing a black negligee that was almost invisible in the light coming through the windows behind her.

She picked up the telephone. «You can cancel that call to Miss Sage, please, operator,» she said.

She looked down at McCoy. «Well, now I know,» she said.

«You know what?»

«That I

am

more important to you than eating a steak.»

His face contorted. His chest shook. He began to sob.

«Oh, baby,» Ernie Sage said, and went to the couch and put her arms around him.

He tried to sit up. «I'm sorry, honey! I'm…«

«Shut up!» she said, then held his face against her breast and ran her hands through his hair, until, after a moment, he stopped crying.

«I wonder if they'll work,» Ernie said.

«What?»

«The oysters. There's a dozen of them.»

«I wondered what those bastards were up to with that oyster business,» he said.

«Those bastards called me the minute they heard you were in California— which is more than you did. And they called me again when they knew when you were due in Washington. If it wasn't for those bastards, you'd still be trying to talk to me on the telephone.»

«Okay. Sorry. Are you really starved? Or would a couple of oysters hold you for a while?»

«Oh, God, Ernie, I love you.»

«If that's the case, what are we doing here in the living room, with all your clothes on?»

He stood up and looked down at her, then leaned over and picked her up and carried her toward the bedroom. Halfway to the door she kissed him, which caused him to lose his sense of direction, and he collided with the door frame.

But he quickly made the necessary course corrections, passed through the door to the bedroom, and kicked the door shut behind them.

note 21

Officers' Club

U.S. Navy Hospital

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1745 17 February 1943

«Hi,» Captain James B. Weston, USMC, said to Lieutenant (j.g.) Janice Hardison, NNC, when she slipped onto the barstool beside him.

«Hi.»

«May I say that you do more for that uniform than any other member of the Naval Officer Corps I have ever met?»

Janice blushed and was furious with herself.

«I hope you're hungry,» he said. «I didn't get any breakfast, as you know, and what they offered for lunch was unfit for human consumption.»

«I have something to tell you about me,» she said.

Oh, shit. What? You've got a boyfriend? Hell, yes, you've got a boyfriend! Someone as good-looking as you are, in the midst of all these nice young men, is not going to be alone for long.

«I'm all ears.»

«I want you to promise, first, that you won't make some smart-aleck reply.»

He held up his fingers in the manner of Boy Scouts vowing the truthfulness of what they are about to say. «Boy Scout's Honor,» he said.

«I'm a virgin,» Janice said.

Just in time, he stopped himself from saying what immediately came to his mind:

No problem. We can fix that tonight

.

«If that was intended to surprise me, it didn't.»

«And I intend to stay that way,» she said. «So maybe you may want to change your mind about…«

«What I am offering, Lieutenant Hardison, is a lobster dinner.»

«You know what I mean,» she said. «I just wanted to have things clear between us.»

«They are crystal clear,» he said. «Now, would you like a drink?»

«Yes, please,» she said. «A weak scotch.»

He signaled the bartender and ordered her drink.

When it was delivered, she took a quick, small sip, put the glass on the bar, looked at him, found him looking at her, and quickly dropped her eyes to her glass.

«How do you like it?» Weston asked.

«Excuse me?»

«Boiled? Broiled? Thermidor?»

«I don't know,» she confessed. «I've never had lobster before.»

What does that make you, a lobster virgin?

«Really?»

«Kansas—Wichita—is a long way from the ocean,» Janice said.

«It's even farther from Scotland,» he said.

«My father's a doctor,» she said. «He taught me to drink scotch.»

And how to keep it till marriage, right?

«What kind of a doctor?»

«A psychiatrist,» she said.

«And that's why you became a psychiatric nurse?»

«I was in a test program at the University… of Kansas, at the Medical School. The university offers a four-year course in nursing. You need an undergraduate degree to get into medical school. They wondered how well a B.S.N. would do in medical school—hopefully better than the usual B.S. or B.A.»

«B.S.N.? Bachelor of Science, Nursing?»

«Right. So I was one of the guinea pigs.»

«How does one get to be a guinea pig?»

«It helps if your father is a professor of medicine,» she said.

«So why aren't you in medical school?»

«Well, the war came along, the Navy came around recruiting nurses, and Daddy said I should take it. Daddy said I could get more clinical experience as a nurse in the service than I would get as a psychiatric resident.»

Daddy said? Daddy said, «Daughter Darling, go in the Navy, drink scotch, and hang on to your pearl of great price until you get married»?

Well, what the hell is wrong with that?

«What about you?» Janice asked.

«University of Iowa,» he said. «I was raised in Des Moines. Offered a chance for flight school, joined the Corps, and here I am.»

«Your parents?»

«My mother died when I was a kid, and my father—he was in the insurance business—died when I was in college.»

«Brothers and sisters?»

«Neither. Just an aunt.»

«I have two brothers,» she said. «Both doctors. One surgeon and one proctologist. My mother was a nurse before she married my father.»

«What's a proctologist?»

«It deals with the lower intestines,» she said after a brief hesitation.

His face lit up. «I know what it means!» he remembered.

«I thought you might,» she said, and smiled at him.

Goddamn, she's really sweet.

Well, why not? Good solid family. Daddy's a doctor, Mommy's a nurse, she was baby sister to two brothers. Either of whom would probably cheerfully break both my legs if! changed her virginal status. Or pull my tonsils through the terminus of my lower intestines with surgical forceps.

«We ate lobster in Iowa,» Weston said. «God only knows how it got there, but there it was.»

«I'm sure we had them in Kansas, too,» she said, loyally. «My family just never ate them.»

«Charley Galloway told me to go where we're going tonight,» Weston said. «Caroline took him there. Place called Bookbinder's.»

«I've been there,» she said, «a couple of times. I've gone as far as clam chowder and broiled flounder, but so far I haven't had the courage for lobster or oysters. Raw oysters.»

«I'd stay away from raw oysters if I were you,» Weston said without thinking first.

Janice blushed.

Oh, shit. You and your big mouth. She's heard what oysters are supposed to do to you.

And she blushed. She's a nurse, she's heard everything, seen everything, and it hasn't touched her, otherwise she wouldn't be blushing.

«Yes, thank you, Captain Weston,» Commander Jerome J. Kister, MC, USNR, said, as he took the barstool beside Janice Hardison, «I will permit you to buy me a drink. I spent most of the afternoon on the telephone about you.»