My companion laughed. “Then it won’t be there,” she said. “Three quarters of the books in that bag are Harlequin romances. I’m Rita, by the way. My husband, J.R., is the tender’s navigator.”
I was about to introduce myself when the woman with the gray bob returned and beckoned all of us to follow her out to the patio, where a long table had been set with fine china and crystal glassware.
This was the view Mary Lou had warned me about. From the patio, the house sloped down to a small garden, and beyond that was a private beach complete with a row of loungers. A few dozen yards from shore, someonehad had the wherewithal to install a floating dock, and beyond that, the entire island of Caprera stretched out before us.
Rita caught me with my mouth open and whispered, “It’s nice to be the commodore’s wife.”
Indeed it was.
34.
WHEN WE HAD FOUND OURseats, the woman with the gray bob stood and welcomed us. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Janine Greer, and I want to thank you for being with us on this most special day.
“Susan,” she said, resting a delicate hand on the shoulder of a woman with a badly cut wedge, “it is impossible to believe you’re leaving us.”
From the other end of the table, someone shouted, “How many beans are left?”
There was a hearty round of laughter, and Susan announced to the crowd, “Only nineteen!”
I was seated between Mary Lou and a young woman about my age named Laura, who had big brown eyes and wavy brown hair that framed her face. Laura was also new, so she didn’t get the joke, either, and Mary Lou leaned over and whispered to both of us, “Susan’s a special case.”
The Jordans were one of the last remaining First Families, which was a reference to the ten American families who had arrived on the island with the U.S.S.Fultonin 1972. And when I saywiththe U.S.S.Fulton, I really do meanwithit. The First Families had been given berths on the submarine tender and traveled from New London to Santo Stefano on the open sea. I am not sure why anyone thought this was a good idea—I suppose there was concern that the wives wouldn’t be able to figure out their connecting flights or find transportation to Palau from Olbia. There also might have been fears that they’d be kidnapped by bandits, which sounds crazy but was happening with some frequency in Sardinia. In any case, the First Families had arrived on theFultonand, for better or worse, been left largely to their own devices. In time, Frank Jordan would get the Navy Support Office up and running, but for Susan and her compatriots, that was too little, too late. She and the other wives found housing by banging on doors and repeating the phrase “Appartamento, per favore”; they enrolled their school-age children at the Italian public school on the island or the IstitutoSan Vincenzo; and if their kids got sick, they relied on local doctors and their own limited vocabularies.
I was homesick enough that I had some sympathy, listening to the ins and outs of Susan’s ordeal, but to hear her tell it, it was like she’d shown up on the dark side of the moon. The joke about the beans was a reference to the two mason jars Susan kept on the windowsill in her kitchen. At some early juncture, she had carefully counted out the remaining days of Frank’s tour, allocating a bean for each day. All the beans had gone in one jar, and every morning since then, she’d solemnly moved one bean to the other jar. Now the original jar was nearly empty, and she was going home.
Once I’d figured this out, I leaned over to Laura and whispered, “May I never be so miserable that I have to count down my days on a beautiful Mediterranean island.”
Laura laughed, but when Mary Lou gave us a sharp look, she stifled it.
The speeches continued, and eventually, Mary Lou gave someone a cue, and a handful of women stood and disappeared into the house, returning with something big and bulky that they’d draped with a bedsheet. “We know you never got around to buying one of these,” said Mary Lou, “so we all pitched in. May it serve as a constant reminder of how grateful we are to you and your family for paving the way here in La Madd.”
One of the women removed the bedsheet to reveal an elaborately carved wooden chest, made of walnut or maybe chestnut. Everyone oohed and aahed over the thing, and Susan sprung up from her seat to hug first Mary Lou and then Janine. “You guys,” she said, as she wiped away happy tears, “I can’t even believe this.”
“They’re hand-carved by artisans up in some of the hill towns like Orani and Nuoro,” explained a woman who was seated across from Laura and me. “You’d pay an absolute fortune for one in the States.”
“It’s nice,” I said, although the chest was far too ornate for my taste.
“Don’t you just love the detail?” said Laura.
“Mmmm,” I agreed.
“Really gorgeous.”
I couldn’t tell if she was putting me on, but when the woman asked her whether she enjoyed collecting antiques, I realized it didn’t matter. Laura whatever-her-name-was knew how the game was played.
35.
WHEN THE HUBBUB HAD DIEDdown and the chest had been carted back inside, Mary Lou returned to her seat. “Have you two officially met?” she said to Laura and me.
The girl stuck out her hand. “Laura Carpenter. My husband, Bobby, is heading up Nuclear Repair.”
There was this thing American women did on the island, which I was beginning to pick up on, where they introduced themselves not just with their names but with what their husbands did. At first I found it off-putting, but I came to realize it was a sort of shorthand that helped us figure out whom we could mix with and whom we couldn’t. If I met the wife of an enlisted man, I could chat with her about the weather or the ferry schedule, but there was no point taking things much further because officers and enlisted personnel didn’t socialize, or at least they weren’t supposed to. This rubbed me the wrong way for a number of reasons, the most glaring of which was that my own brother had been enlisted, and—were I to have served my country, with the measly sixty-one college credits I’d managed to acquire—I’d have been enlisted, too.
What Laura was telling me, when she said her husband “headed up” the Nuclear Repair Division, was that he was an officer and he and Paul were equals. This was important because it meant that if at some point we had them over for pizza or burgers or whatever, Paul and Bobby could sit around in the backyard, drinking imported Budweisers, with little worry that they were going to somehow tank their careers in the process.
Since I was an ass and had not yet learned to play the game, I simply said, “I’m Eileen Archer.”
“Eileen’s husband, Paul, is the new division director for RADCON,” said Mary Lou.
