“Flying Tigers” as bandits and beheaded the ones they caught.
Doug Douglass was welcome to Little Joe’s room anytime he wanted it.
But not for the purpose Charity obviously had in mind. Sarah took her into the butler’s pantry and told her so.
“I don’t mean to be nasty about this, Charity,” she said. “But if you insist on acting like a woman who goes to hotels with men, go to a hotel.”
“If there were any vacant hotel rooms in Washington, and there are not, they would not rent one to an aviator and his blonde,” Charity argued. KTHEY demand marriage licenses.”
“Then you are just going to have to restrain your impulses until you can arrange something,” Sarah said. She giggled and added, “Either a marriage license or your own apartment.”
“Unfortunately, there’s no time to do that,” Charity said.
“Unless you get to roll around with him tonight, you’ll go blind, right, or grow hair on your palms?”
“This time tomorrow night, he’u be in his little airplane somewhere over the Atlantic,” Charity said.
“Did he tell you that?” Sarah asked.
“No, and I don’t want him to know I know,” Charity said.
“If it’s a secret, why are you telling me?”
“What are you going to do, phone Hitler? The only reason I’m telling you is that I want you to know how important this is to me.”
“Charity, I love you, but I know you. If I ever found out… ”
“The reason I know is that Captain Douglass told me to get reports from the Navy on the progress of a flight of P-38s from Westover Field in Massachusetts tomorrow afternoon. They’re flying via Newfoundland to Scotland.
Doug told me he’s going to Westover. I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put two and two together.”
“My God, if Ed found out, he’d kill me,” Sarah said, weakening.
“He won’t be home until Tuesday,” Charity argued conclusively.
“You told me that yourself. And if you don’t tell him, I certainly won’t.”
“I’m going to take Joe for a walk,” Sarah said finally, feeling very much the sophisticated woman of the world. “Do what you think is right.” And Sarah took Little Joe for a walk, although he didn’t need one.
What happened between Doug and Charity while she was gone was none of her business.
But she hadn’t imagined they wouldn’t be finished when she came back.
Or that they would keep it up for hours.
She concluded that the best way to handle the situation was to just go to bed and say nothing until after Doug left in the morning.
Then she would really give Charity a piece of her mind.
It was a lucky thing Ed wasn’t home. Ed would have had a fit.
But Ed had told her–with certainty–that his duty as aide-de-camp to Vice Admiral Enoch Hawley, USN, Chief Aviation Materiel Assignments Branch, BUAIR, would keep him out of town for at least the weekend and probably into Tuesday.
Lieutenant Commander Edwin Ward Bitter, USN, returned home three hours later, just before midnight.
When he found the baby’s crib in their bedroom, his curiosity was aroused. “Who’s here?” he asked when he crawled into bed beside Sarah.
Feigning a much deeper sleep than was the case, Sarah replied, “Douglass.”
“Good,” Ed said happily and went to sleep.
That bought her some time, Sarah thought, to consider how to handlle the situation when it came up in the morning as it would as inevitably as the sun.
Being married to one herself, Sarah had come to understand that service academy graduates and career officers were just plain different from other officers. They saw things in another kind of light, they had more rigid codes of honor and standards of behavior than people like, say, Ed’s (and Sarah’s and Doug’s) friend Dick Canidy.
Sometimes these diffe ring perceptions were evident. For starters, both Doug, who was a West Pointer, and Ed, who had gone to Annapolis, were not amused–and let him know it–whenever Canidy characterized the Army-Navy Club as
“The Old Farts Home.” And both took offense whenever Dick or Jim Whittaker mocked the professional military establishment.
And now Doug Douglass had stepped over the professional line, It was another of those odd military customs that Sarah had so much trouble understanding. Ed certainly didn’t expect Douglass, who was a healthy young bachelor, to play the celibate. But he fully expected him to obey the hoary adage that an officer must keep his indiscretions one hundred miles from the flagpole.