Across the dark blue of Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, the first big island near Alaska in the Aleutian Chain, Lana La Roche, née Brentwood, and Elizabeth Ryan, a black nurse from Boston, could see the bobbing lights of the fishing boats that normally plied the seas north of the Aleutian arc south of the ice pack. The harbor this evening was fairly glistening with the dipping lights of the small but powerful deep-sea trawlers that had run for cover in the harbor before a clump of Arctic fronts that were en route from the Pole with 150-kilometer-per-hour winds in the offing.
“I thought,” said Lana easily, “there was supposed to be a blackout in progress?”
“You know what those fishermen are like, honey,” said Elizabeth, who had done her nurse’s training with Lana on the East Coast at a joint U.S./Canadian navy hospital in Halifax and from which Lana had been officially “transferred”—in effect exiled for having given a young, dying British seaman a woman’s caring touch aboard an Allied hospital ship.
The head nurse at the hospital and on board the ship, Matron “Scud,” so-called because it was said that you never knew where she and her broomstick would land, had been outraged by Lana’s unprofessional conduct. So had Lana — for about five seconds. Then she realized she had only been guilty of being a woman who had given a dying man sexual release, something that, because of his youth and his very proper middle-class British upbringing, he’d hitherto not experienced. Besides, it wasn’t as if they’d actually been in the bed together. But it made no difference to Matron, and so Lana had been sent to “America’s Siberia”—the Aleutians. Yet, despite the fact that she didn’t like her posting in Dutch Harbor, that she always felt cold, she never regretted doing what she had done for the young Englishman. Look at what had ensued from it. His personal effects had been returned to his parents in England by Lana’s eldest brother, Robert, a submariner, when he had taken leave from Holy Loch in Scotland. Robert had met Rosemary Spence, the boy’s eldest sister, and ended up marrying her.
“Till it hits them like a williwaw they’ll keep the lights blazing,” said Elizabeth. A williwaw was the hundred-mile-an-hour wind that, along with fog and rain and sunshine, which could all occur within half an hour, made the climate of the Bering Sea one of the most unpredictable and harshest on earth. It was one of the reasons Lana was so deeply touched by Elizabeth having voluntarily transferred to Dutch Harbor to be with her.
“I hope they’re right,” responded Lana, “that it doesn’t get this far south. The fighting, I mean.”
“You heard from your sweetie pie?” asked Elizabeth as they headed for the bridge that led over to the clutter of buildings and what little night life there was in the harbor.
“No,” sighed Lana, her hands folded, sending a piece of ice skittering across the road as they made for the dirty shoulder of salt and snow to allow an army truck to pass. They were heading for “Stormy’s” restaurant, their big adventure for the week, to try some Greek chicken — one of the house specialties. Such outings from the naval base were rare now that the hospital, like so many other bases from Fort Ord to Faslane in Scotland, were reopening after only recently being closed down because of the Russian surrender at Minsk. The hospital staff found themselves short-handed. Everyone was working extra shifts, preparing for what they all hoped would never happen: massive casualties coming in from the battles on and across the Bering Sea.
She hadn’t heard from Frank for a month or so but knew it wouldn’t be long before he was mainland bound, to the naval air base at Elmendorf with two war tours in the Pacific behind him, during one of which he had shot down the MiG-29 Fulcrum state-of-the-art fighter flown by Soviet ace Sergei Marchenko as they’d mixed it up over the Yalu River in Korea. Though Shirer’s radio intercept officer in the Tomcat hadn’t seen a chute, and they’d both seen a pinhead-sized blossom that must have been the Fulcrum crashing into the frozen wastes of Manchuria, there had grown in Shirer’s mind a nagging doubt about whether the Russian had gone down with his plane. Meanwhile the twenty-seven-year-old Shirer had been celebrated, except in the La Roche papers, for having shattered the myth of the Marchenko invincibility among Allied pilots.
“Where’s he going to?” asked Elizabeth.
“Elmendorf,” said Lana. “He might already be there.”
“Uh-huh,” murmured Elizabeth. Scuttlebutt was rife around any base in any war. They’d all been told that, and how rumors were sometimes spread by the enemy just to eat away at morale. So no way Elizabeth was going to tell Lana that there was a rumor floating around that Salt Lake City was in the thick of it, launching air strikes against some Russian island up in the strait, that some planes had been shot down. Anyway, maybe Lana was right, and her man was safe and sound at Elmendorf.
“You know something, Elizabeth?” Lana asked, stopping.
Elizabeth kept walking, glancing back.”Honey, you’ll freeze your ass off you don’t keep on truckin’!”
“Elizabeth. What’ve you heard?”
Elizabeth stopped and turned around. “All right. I heard that no-good husband of yours—Mister La Roche — has been living pretty high off the hog. I mean girls, lots of ‘em. Papers are full of it, they say.”
Lana shrugged. “It wouldn’t be in the papers if he didn’t want it known. He likes to show off. Big shot. Big kid. They don’t print the rest of it.” Elizabeth was starting off again, Lana catching up, their thick-tread winter boots cracking the brittle ice, their breaths clouds of steam above their anoraks, the ice-crystalline air so clear, the moon looked like a huge communion wafer.
“You want to talk about it, honey?” said Elizabeth, ever the willing ear to her friends.
“No,” said Lana. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Honey. Nuthin’—I mean nuthin ‘—fazes ‘Lizabeth Ryan. I’ve seen them all.”
No, you haven’t, thought Lana, but she said nothing, trying not to think of Jay La Roche, trying to ignore the fact he wouldn’t give her a divorce. He loved power and wouldn’t let go of anything. It wasn’t enough that he owned the huge chemical/arms La Roche multinationals, from New York to Shanghai to Paris. He had to control everyone and everything in his world. Lack of control spelled not only humiliation for Jay La Roche but the secret fear of madness. Yet the great irony, she knew, was that he was already mad — clinically certifiable — but his power was a moat around his castle keep that normal society could not cross. His tabloids would smear anyone who tried. His lawyers would do the rest.
“Hey,” said Elizabeth, “isn’t it your birthday next month?”
“You know my blood type, too?” said Lana, smiling, trying harder now to forget Jay La Roche, how one night — the last terrible night, in Shanghai, before she’d left or, more accurately, escaped — in one of his drinking bouts, he’d poured whiskey on it and pushed it into her mouth, telling her if she didn’t suck it “dry… I’ll bash your fucking head in!” And if she threatened to take him to court, he’d use his tabloids, not on her but to smear “shit all over your lovey-dovey Ma and Pa — the big fucking admiral and Mrs. Fucking Admiral!” And then later, in the gray of the China dawn, he’d come in to her like a whipped spaniel, stale, boozy breath, telling her he was sorry, that he loved her. And the most awful part of it was her knowing he meant it — that he couldn’t control his other self, the one beneath the public persona, beneath the lean, suave, rich-industrialist smile, the one that turned every act of love into a depraved ritual, obsessive and obscene.
“He’s a survivor,” said Elizabeth, and for a moment Lana thought she meant Jay.
“He’s probably got his feet up in Elmendorf,” said Elizabeth heartily, “chewing the fat with some other hotshot pilot. Probably writing you a letter this minute. Oh Lordy, will you look at that now!” It was a Marine sergeant, stepping out of a Humvee, the driver making a U-turn so the vehicle was facing back toward the town as the sergeant driver approached the two nurses.
“My,” said Elizabeth huskily. “I’d sure like to mother him.”
“Elizabeth!” said Lana as the sergeant kept walking toward them.
“Yes, ma’am,” Elizabeth continued, unabashed. “He could ‘spect my plumbin’ any day. Mind you, he’d have to say, ‘Please, ma’am — pretty please.’ “
“Hussy!” said Lana.
“That’s me — Boston Boobs. You lookin’ for me, Sergeant?”
“Ah — ah yes, ma’am. You Lieutenant Brentwood?”
“I am,” said Lana.
“Ma’am,” said the sergeant, snapping a salute. “They said you were heading over to Stormy’s.”
“Yes.”
There was an awkward silence, and all Lana could hear was the spitting of the Humvee’s exhaust, its long, bluish white curl trailing up behind the truck then suddenly disappearing in the pristine night air.
“Ma’am…” The sergeant saluted again and gave her the brown-widow envelope. It was stiff with cold. She couldn’t open it with her mittens, and Elizabeth did it for her but didn’t read it. Despite her almost legendary self-control Lana was crying, the tears freezing her cheeks.
“Can we give you a lift, ma’am?”
Lana looked at Elizabeth. She needed help. Elizabeth told the sergeant to forget Stormy’s, to return them to the base. Then halfway back she thought perhaps they should have gone to Stormy’s after all. Do something. Anything. She didn’t know. They returned to the base.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” said Elizabeth, noting the man’s name patch: Dukowski. Ah.
Inside the Quonset hut, Lana was collecting herself, surprised at how poorly she’d handled it. “Good grief,” she sobbed to Elizabeth, “I deal with this every week on the wards. I mean I used to—”
Elizabeth handed her a mug of coffee that Lana held between her knees for warmth. She began rocking gently back and forth like an old woman, and it bothered Elizabeth more than when Lana had first read the fax. “Hell, honey,” Elizabeth tried to assure her, “never the same till it hits you.”
“No,” said Lana. “No, it isn’t.”
“Now you listen to me, Lana. That dumb old fax says ‘MIA.’ That doesn’t mean… Well, if he’s MIA, he could be on the ice pack up there. Better’n in the drink.” Elizabeth looked up at the curved ceiling of the Quonset hut. No matter that it wasn’t a ward — everything smelled of antiseptic. “Man, I never thought I’d be thanking God it was winter.”
“I — don’t understand,” said Lana.
“Well, summertime they’d be in the water. Freezin’ water. They stand a better chance out there on the ice.”
“They?” Lana was confused.
“Two guys in a Tomcat, Lana.”
“Oh.”
“I know all about Tomcats, honey,” said Elizabeth smiling. “I like ’em!”
Lana tried to be cheerful in kind but everything about her, the darkness about the Quonset hut, the smells of the hospital, of fresh coffee brewing, oppressed her — the very air suddenly too heavy and the forlorn howl of the Arctic wind soul-crushing. Other nurses — nurses who had lost loved ones — said it was the not knowing that was the worst, not knowing for sure whether they were alive or dead, but Lana felt no such yearning for a definite answer. So long as they weren’t certain definite knowns there was hope that Frank had been rescued — or, as Elizabeth had said, was on the ice waiting to be rescued.
What frightened her most was that now, when she wanted desperately to remember every detail of her and Frank’s intimacy, of his strength and gentleness when they made love, she couldn’t see him clearly in her mind’s eye. It had happened before, at moments when it seemed that she had wanted him too much. Jay La Roche’s face, on the other hand, was so clear, his jealousy and hate so palpable, it was as if he were a presence in the room, with his contemptuous smile of victory, his eyes coke-sniffing bright and alive.