“I’ll change your mind, and that’s a promise,” Wyckoff said, already in the salesman’s mode.
A large orchestra was playing “White Christmas,” which mingled strangely with the smell of ripening citrus. Mulatto girls sat with Allied officers at their tables and danced with them. These weren’t prostitutes or even B-girls, who were charged with encouraging sailors to buy them drinks. More likely they were clerks or shopgirls. What money changed hands would be a gift, not a fee. Eddie had partaken of many such arrangements over the years, but found himself observing the present scene with disdain. Then he realized why: he was picturing it through the bosun’s eyes.
*
The day before they were to sail, Farmingdale failed to report for duty and could not be found. The Elizabeth Seaman couldn’t sail without a second mate, so she missed the convoy she was to have joined through the Mozambique Channel, a stretch of sea between Madagascar and the African coast where many Allied ships had been lost to Nazi submarine wolf packs. Farmingdale turned up three days later in the army stockade, his offense so grievous that the army refused to release him until the Elizabeth Seaman was ready to cast off lines.
On March 9, military police delivered the second mate to the gangway, and he was summoned directly to the master’s office. For all Kittredge’s pretty-boy looks, no one could say he didn’t let Farmingdale have it. If there was one thing this captain could not abide, it was being left behind. Now a laggard, the Elizabeth Seaman was forced to sail independently on an evasive course—twenty degrees to the right for ten minutes, then twenty degrees to the left, then back to her original course for ten minutes more, and so on—not only at night, when U-boats were most active, but all day. They sailed toward the Mozambique Channel with davits swung out, ready to lower the lifeboats if their ship should be hit.
Farmingdale was a pariah. For two days, he came late to chow and sat with the cadets at their small table. He wore a quixotic smile, as though his isolation were a rare privilege. On the third day, Eddie tried to signal forgiveness when Farmingdale relieved him of the morning watch. Eddie made a point of greeting him warmly, even giving him a conciliatory pat as he relayed their course and position. But Farmingdale heaved an impatient sigh at these transparent efforts and stared off, stroking his snowy beard as though it were a secret trove of strength.
That afternoon, Sparks received a second direct radio message for the Elizabeth Seaman, and their course was altered. Shortly before midnight, at a rendezvous point fifty miles northeast of Durban, seventy-seven ships materialized around theirs as if through divine intervention. An immense effort was required to maneuver the Elizabeth Seaman into her station without colliding with other ships, all of them blacked out except for a faint light at the stern. Eddie stood with the captain on the flying bridge, working the engine room telegraph to communicate speed and direction to the engineers below. He couldn’t help ascribing almost supernatural powers to Kittredge. His American good luck had come to their rescue. Eddie had craved such luck all his life—reached for it every way he could. Perhaps having luck meant you didn’t have to reach.
The convoy course was transmitted in Morse code by blinker signal lights that operated like venetian blinds. From the commodore’s ship in the middle of the first row, the signal was passed backward along each column of ships, a process that took nearly thirty minutes to complete. Then, as one invisible mass, the convoy set a course of forty-three degrees toward the Mozambique Channel.
At sunrise, during general quarters, Eddie gazed out alongside the mate at an ocean studded by nearly eighty ships arrayed in a vast design with the ritual splendor of chess pieces. “That is beauty like no other I’ve seen,” he said.
“Prettier near the middle,” the mate said, chuckling, for their station was perilously close to one of the “coffin corners” most vulnerable to U-boats. It didn’t matter. The convergence was so spectacular, so monumental in its scale and span, that being part of it made Eddie feel invincible. He saw ships’ flags from Portugal, Free France, Brazil, Panama, South Africa. On the Dutch freighter to starboard, two children scampered among linens billowing from a wash line. Apparently the ship’s master had fled Holland with his family to escape the Nazis.
Fifteen smaller, faster escort vessels—destroyers and corvettes—flitted alongside the expanse of ships like police horses at a parade. While a convoy couldn’t stop for a disabled ship, an escort vessel would stay behind and help to rescue its crew. This fact, more than any other, relieved Eddie.
Only one man aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was unhappy with the new arrangement: her captain. Convoys had to run at the speed of the slowest ship, and because this one included a Panamanian coal burner, they were held to eight knots. “We made better time zigzagging,” Kittredge groused to the chief engineer, who sat to his right at chow.
After midnight, when Eddie was relieved by Farmingdale (still wearing his whimsical smile), he found Wyckoff, the naval ensign, waiting outside his stateroom with a bottle of wine. “We’ll drink it outdoors,” he said. “It’s a perfect night. Where you drink wine matters as much as the wine itself.”
They sat on the number two hatch cover. The night was cool and clear, a rolling sea just visible under a paring of moon. Eddie couldn’t see the ships around them, but he perceived their density, five hundred feet away fore and aft, a thousand feet abeam, all nosing together through the swells like a spectral herd. Eddie heard the cork leaving Wyckoff’s bottle, caught a tart, woody smell of the wine. The ensign poured a modest amount into two enameled cups. “Don’t drink it yet,” he cautioned as Eddie lifted his. “Let it breathe.”
The Southern Cross hung near the horizon. Eddie preferred the southern sky; it was brighter, denser with planets.
“All right. Now,” Wyckoff said after several minutes. “Take a sip and move it around your mouth before you swallow.”
It sounded loopy, but Eddie did as instructed. At first there was just the ashy pucker he’d always disliked in wine, but that flavor yielded to an appealing overripeness, even a suggestion of decay. “Better,” he said with surprise.
They drank and looked at the stars. After the war, Wyckoff said, he hoped to find a job planting grapes in the valleys north of San Francisco. There had been vineyards there, but the dry agents had burned them during Prohibition.
“What about you, Third?” he asked. “What will you do after the war?”
Eddie knew what he wanted to say, but waited several moments to be sure. “I’ll go back home to New York,” he said. “I’ve a daughter there.”
“What’s her name?”