He insisted on offering a prayer for their safe journey, and they stood for a moment with their heads bowed beside the Devastator.
As he looked up at his father after the prayer, Canidy was surprised that his eyes were watering and his throat was constricted.
0930 Friday mornthe parade for the graduating pilots was held at ing. The prescribed uniform for the staff (the IPS) was dress whites, with swords and medals. Neither Canidy nor Bitter had any medals yet, but the brass, particularly the older brass, had rows of them. From the World War, Canidy thought. The last World War.
The swords were absurd. No naval officer had ever used a sword in the last war, and now they were getting ready for another war, and they still wore them. He was amused that he would be taking the sword (because he had forgotten to pack it with the things he had taken to Cedar Rapids and didn’t know what else to do With it) to China.
The parade was over at I 100 hours. They put their swords in the trunk of Bitter’s Buick, where they had previously packed overnight bags, and left the base in their dress whites. They took off their uniform caps as soon as they were out of Pensacola, put the roof down, and headed toward Mobile. e upper end of Mobile Bay, and as they ap proached Mobile, they came to the Mobile Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. A dozen ships-cargo ships, tankers, and what looked like the hull of a light cruiserwere on the ways in various stages of construction.
“My cousin Mark works there,” Bitter said. “He’ll be at The Plantation. He’s the assistant superintendent of construction.”
That was not how Chesty Whittaker had described Mark Chambers’s role at the shipyard. Chesty said he owned it.
“I’m impressed,” Canidy replied.
He feared again that he was opening some Pandora’s box by go-ing where Sue Ellen was.
But then he decided to hell with it. What he would do would be the perfect gentleman, faithfully pretending that he had never seen her before. If that made her a little uncomfortable, that was probably an appropriate punishment for a married woman who went around screwing strange sailors.
The deeper the Crescent moved into the Deep South, the more convinced Sarah Child felt that the trip was a mistake. Sarah was slight, with dark eyes, light complexion, and black hair; she was nineteen years old, a Bryn Mawr sophomore, and a New Yorker. Her father, a banker, was the grandson of a banker who had been sent from Frankfurt am Main to open a New York branch. The grandfather and his son, and Sarah’s father, had been more successful in the New World than anyone in Frankfurt had dreamed. Frankfurt was thus now considered one of several overseas branches of the New York bank.
Her best friends at Bryn Mawr, Ann Chambers and Charity Hoche, were what Sarah thought of as “healthy” (that is, taller, heavier, and larger-bosomed), blond, fair-skinned, Southerners and Protestant Christian.
Bryn Mawr was one thing, and entertaining the girls at the Child apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan was one thing, but coming south with them to a “plantation” was another.
Sarah could not put her finger on precisely why she was scared and uncomfortable, but that didn’t change anything. Partly, she knew, it was because her mother (a woman with what was calledto be nice-a nervous condition) was opposed to her coming down here, and partly it was because Sarah hadn’t really had much experience with these kinds of people. Her first night at Bryn Mawr had been the first time she had been separated from her parents overnight. And then later Ann and Charity had become the first friends she’d ever made who weren’t Jews.
They got off the Crescent in Montgomery, Alabama (“Heart of Dixie ‘ ” a sign proclaimed. “See the first capital of the Confederate States of America”), at 5:20 Pm. on Thursday. An enormous, very black man named Robert met them with Ann Chambers’s mother’s Lincoln. Ten minutes later, they were driving out of town down a narrow, winding macadam road at seventy-five miles an hour into a seemingly endless forest of pine trees. An hour and a half later, the Lincoln stopped before the white columns of a huge house.