“On a white stallion, dressed up like Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, saluting..
Whittaker demonstrated the salute, using the third finger on his left hand in an upward position.
Canidy laughed heartily and went on. “And, with a cry of “Fuck you! I am the little boy who never existed, you can’t draft me! Fight your own damned war,’ galloping off into the sunset.”
“My God, you’re disgusting,” Cynthia said.
“I think,” Jim Whittaker said, “that you’re in trouble, Richard.”
“I think you two owe everyone an apology for your vulgarity,” Chesty Whittaker said furiously.
“I’m sorry,” Canidy said.
“Well, hell, I’m not,” Jim Whittaker said. “And I’m not going to be a hypocrite about it. No harm was intended.”
“You don’t feel you owe Cynthia an apology, is that what you’re saying?” Chesty Whittaker asked, softly and coldly. “For what?”
“For your language and that obscene gesture.”
“This, you mean?” Jim Whittaker asked, making the gesture again. “Cynthia doesn’t even know what it means. And Canidy said ‘fuck,’ not me.”
Chesty Whittaker’s face whitened.
“Stanley, Cynthia, I apologize to you for my nephew and his friend. I can only say that they have obviously had too much to drink.”
“I have not yet begun to drink,” Whittaker said, “as one sailor or another is supposed to have said.”
“Ed,” Chesty Whittaker said to Bitter, can I rely on you to get them home safely?”
“Yes, sir,” Bitter said. “And I’m sorry.”
“The two of you together are too explosive for your own good,” Chesty Whittaker said.
Then he followed Stanley S. Fine and Cynthia Chenowith out of the dining room.
“As Jim’s guest, I know I’m not in a position to say this, but I will. The two of you were disgusting,” Bitter said.
“Go with the good people, Edwin,” Canidy said. “I have all the selfrighteousness I can take for one night.”
“I told Mr. Whittaker I would take care of you, and I will,” Bitter said.
Whittaker and Canidy looked at each other, and then, simultaneously, they both gave Bitter the finger.
“Fuck you, Edwin!” they said in chorus. And laughed.
Bitter walked quickly after the others.
Whittaker caught the sommelier’s eye and ordered a bottle of cognac.
“Nothing very elaborate, you understand, my friend and I are just junior officers, but something decent.”
“I have just the thing, Mr. Whittaker, a very nice, not very well known label, by the people who bottle Grand Mamier.”
“That will do nicely,” Whittaker said.
When the cognac was delivered, he interrupted the waiter’s ritual pouring by taking the bottle away from him and filling the snifters well over half full.
“I am going to miss you, Richard,” he said.
“Me, too,” Canidy said. “Here’s to strays and orphans,” Whittaker said. “You and me and Fulmar, wherever good ol’eric may be.”
They took a swallow of cognac. “Aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces,” Whittaker said. “Whatever you said,” Canidy said, and they took a second swallow.
“Draft dodgers Whittaker said.
“Especially good ol’eric, who is obviously smarter than you or me,” Canidy countered.
They drained the snifters with the third toast. Whittaker picked up the bottle and started to pour again.
Not looking at Canidy, and very softly, he said, “I used to wonder how I knew Chesty was bedding her. I never caught them, of course. But I knew.” Canidy looked at him but said nothing.
“You realize, of course, Richard,” Whittaker asked, “that I am confiding in you only because I am confident you will get your ass shot off in China?”
Canidy nodded. “And then I knew how I knew,” he said. “Because I love her.
And because I love him.”
He handed a snifter to Canidy and raised his own.
“Love, Lieutenant Canidy,” he said. “Love, Lieutenant Whittaker,” Canidy said.
The Plantation 131bb County, Alabama June 17Y 1941
Ann Chambers had known since she was fourteen that she had inherited her father’s character and his brains and that her brothers Sam Mark and Charley had gotten from their mother their charm and their tendency to see things as they wished they were, rather than as they really were.
They were considered charming and pleasant-and they were. Ann was considered assertive and aggressive-and she was. In fact, she had a masculine mind, she thought. She much preferred the company of men to women. And she felt she understood men in ways her girlfriends didn’t… couldn’t; Sarah, for instance, didn’t. Sarah -had gotten itchy britches from Ed Bitter the moment she had seen him, and she had done everything but back up to him like a bitch in heat.