Chapter 11
Few people realize the pressures that accumulate in women who spend their days waiting for their husband's return from dangerous military assignments. In some cases these pressures grow into hysteria or nervous breakdowns. In other cases they take more exotic forms, such as sexual adventures which act as a balm on their perturbed state of mind.
Ruth W. was just such a case. After over ten years as a Navy wife she thought she had all those pressures under control. She was sadly mistaken. One brief but frightening emergency sent her into the arms of a young boy, after a lifetime of fidelity.
Her husband Donald was a submarine officer. Each tour in a sub usually lasted sixty days and then he would have shore leave for about thirty. He had been in the submarine service for so long that Ruth was used to this rhythm.
I interviewed Ruth months after the crisis was over and she spoke about it in a very detached manner, as if it had happened to someone else and she was merely commenting on it. It was immediately obvious that the brief interlude had not in any way damaged her emotional equilibrium, nor had it created a breech between her and her husband. Ruth told me that her husband knew about those few days and had completely forgiven her.
During our first meeting, I requested that she tell me the background of the incident. She readily complied:
"There is a calendar in my bedroom on which I check off Donald's days on the submarine, sixty days in all. It had become more or less automatic and I no longer even counted the days; I just assumed that when about two sheets were checked off, representing two months, he would walk through the door, his sea-bag over his shoulder, grinning that pixie grin. But then I realized that I was on the third sheet. At first I thought it was a mistake because I had received no notification from the operations office that the sub was being held at sea. I checked it. I counted the days. Donald had been out almost sixty-five days. I panicked at first but gradually I gained control and called a friend whose husband was on Donald's sub. She, too, had not noticed it.
"I called the Submarine Group Commander asking for any information. His secretary would not put me through so I knew immediately that something was wrong. The next morning the radio carried a report of Donald's submarine being over due. No contact with the sub had been made.
"All kinds of visions came into my head. I pictured the sub slowly being crushed under the massive pressure after a dive. I 'pictured Donald being swept away by the raging water and crushed against the walls of the sub. My hands shook so much that I could not hold anything or even work the zipper on my dress.
"That evening, after the radio report confirmed our fears, a group of the wives met in my house. From there we went to the base commander's office and demanded to see him. At first he would not meet with us, but he finally agreed to see us after we notified him that we would stay there until the following year if necessary.
"But he had nothing substantial to tell us. The sub was overdue and radio contact had been broken. He unrolled a map and showed us where the last contact had been made, about seven hundred miles off Cape Cod.
"One of the wives demanded that he tell us whether or not the sub was on an espionage assignment or some similar type of dangerous mission. The Commander assured us that the sub was on a routine tour and had probably needed some minor repairs which it was doing itself and had stopped radioing in order to test the sub's ability to remain in open waters without detection. There were too many contradictions in the description for any of us to believe him. But he could tell us nothing else, so we returned to our respective homes to begin our vigil."
She was silent for a while, remembering those events. Then she walked to a table where a picture of a naval officer stood. She picked it up and brought it over to me. I looked at it and asked:
"Is that your husband?"
"Yes," she replied, "only now he has put on a little weight."
"A very handsome man."
"And a good man," she added, "a man who wishes more than anything else to serve his God and his country. I am proud to be married to him."
During our interview, Donald was at sea and Ruth continually spoke of him to me as if the mere mention of his name was a good luck charm that would assure his return.
After this brief digression, she returned to her story:
"So, the hours and minutes began to pass, slowly, in excrutiating pain for the women involved. I could not sleep or eat. I began to remember little things, like the time I forgot Donald's birthday or that incident where I walked out of our car in a rage while he was teaching me to drive. Every real or imagined wrong I had ever done to my husband returned to haunt. The idea of not seeing him again and being able to confess my guilt was intolerable.
"During my marriage to Donald there had been many a crisis. After all, I was no longer a child, I was thirty-four years old. Why now, was I beginning to fall apart just because the sub was a few days late? I could not answer the question I posed to myself. And nothing seemed to help my rapid deterioration. One of my friends, noticing my complete falling apart at the seams, suggested that I go into a hospital. Savagely, I refused her suggestion, calling her names that I never used before in my life."
For the first time, at that moment, I noticed Ruth's coolness cracking. The memory of those days were still almost unbearable. But she recovered quickly and continued.
"But these were only preliminaries. The next part of my story is why you are here. I will try to be clinical and truthful though you must remember what I went through. No doubt the terrible guilt feelings which arose in me after the actual event have modified my story, subconsciously.
But I will do my best."
I assured her that anything she told me would be of value and no one can be expected to tell the absolute truth in regard to detail. In fact, such a thing was not possible and I informed her so. She sat down in a large loveseat and curled her legs up beneath her.
"I was returning late at night from a meeting of the wives of the crew. Taking out my keys, I inserted one into the front door of the house. The door was open. This sudden fact sobered me and I pulled myself together. Someone must be inside, I thought. You can get a picture of my mental state by the fact that I did not even consider calling the police. I no longer even cared for my own safety.
"Tiptoeing in, I heard a sound on the second floor. Walking upstairs, there was a light from under the bedroom door. I walked quickly to it and opened the door.
"There was a boy inside. He had not heard me enter the house and he was still rifling through the cabinet. But now he turned around, his thin face white and fearful. He looked at me and his eyes roved around the room, searching for a possible escape route.
"Strangely enough, I was almost happy to see the thief. I smiled at him. He looked perplexed. Then I invited him downstairs for a cup of hot chocolate. The thief must have thought I was insane. But what could he do. He followed me downstairs and into the kitchen, where I prepared the hot drink. He sat warily on the edge of a kitchen chair, watching me for some sign that I was about to call the police.
"He couldn't have been more than fifteen, with very white skin and dark black hair. He was thin and looked painfully undernourished about the cheeks. I asked him his name. He told me to call him Nick. He drank the hot chocolate, without a word, and then we sat looking at each other in silence. I apologized that we kept nothing of value in the house. Nick grinned at my remarks.
"I don't know how it happened, but as we were sitting there, the petty thief from the slums and the naval officer's wife, we both started to cry. It was one of the strangest events of my life. Suddenly, looking at the boy, the tears began to fall down my cheeks.
"A moment later the child was in my arms, sobbing against my breast. Looking back over the event, I can only conclude that there is a certain unwritten and unspoken language between some people which suddenly comes to the surface and allows them both to exchange some terrible and heartrending secret.
"Somehow, that poor pathetic boy, scared out of his wits, personified every one of my fears for my husband. I realize it was a mystical feeling but that does not diminish its power. The child, Nick, in that instant, became the focal point of every psychic current that was contributing to my breakdown.-
"I wanted him closer to me. I wanted his body to partake of mine, to receive all my fears and and all my hurt. I wanted his pale face to understand what I was going through, the agony of thinking one's husband is crushed to death beneath thousands of fathoms of water, and more than that, I wanted to share his grief and his life.
"Swiftly, without even thinking on a conscious level, I opened my dress and bared my breast. Nick's body stiffened and I heard one long, horrible sob coming from the depth of his body. A second later, his face was buried between my bare breasts, covering the flesh with his childish but passionate lips, burning holes into my mind, scarring the flesh with the young and tormented life he had lived.
"It was a moment of hysteria for both of us. It was a moment of drama for two persons who had never met before and who were separated by age, social class, but not by the fact of suffering. That was the link that brought us into communion.
"We fell to the floor, his mouth on my nipple. My hands were ripping at his clothes, struggling to free his maleness from the prison it was held in. During that time, I had no conception at all that I was engaging in sexual activities. It was a moment that transcended all notions of sex. I was joined with all the sadness in the world and all the sadness that would ever be.
"It was free. It was in my hands. Holding it, feeling it, I felt a surge of release. For the first time since the submarine had been reported missing, I had a clear head.
"But I had to be joined completely. I pushed Nick away from my nipples and spread my legs for him. I waited, my tears streaming down my face and my whole body quivering with the anticipation of almost a religious moment. Poor frightened Nick, he was so caught up in that weird combination of spirituality and lust that he could scarcely function.
"I pulled him on top of me and I screamed as the magnificent thrust of a young maleness ripped apart all the spider webs of my sorrow. Beneath him, beneath that child's maleness, straining and thrusting its way to an impatient maturity, my womanhood opened completely to it. I was so vulnerable, like a slowly expanding spring that moves to warmth. There, on the kitchen floor, on the cold tile, we joined our seed. There, in the house of my husband, I received a strange little thief's most intimate seed. May God forgive me."
She was silent. Her hands were moving nervously back and forth across her thigh.
"Did you," I asked her, "at any time during the actual sexual act, compare the boy with your husband."
"No," she said emphatically.
"Did you feel that you had been sexually fulfilled afterwards?"
"I can't answer that because I did not look upon it at that time, or now, as primarily a sexual experience. It was a means I used, subconsciously, to survive those terrible days when the sub was missing."
She paused again and this time I could almost feel her reflecting on her words. Then she continued.
"I asked Nick to stay the night. He agreed. We sat talking for many hours. He told me about the poverty he had grown up in and the times he had been in reform school. I told him about my life as a Navy wife and about my husband. He was very excited that I was the wife of a submariner and I lied to him by saying that someday he could be an officer, a thing I knew was impossible when one had a jail record, even a reform school record.
"It was one of the most lovely conversations I ever had in my life. And while the thought of the sub was always on my mind, the pain had been dulled and I could think clearly for the first time in days. I gave him the bedroom and I stayed in the guestroom. I fell asleep almost immediately.
"But an hour later I was wakened by a touch. It was Nick. He told me that he could not sleep. I gestured that he should come into bed with me. He climbed between the sheet and I felt his pliant body next to me.
"As we were resting like that, I had a vision of Donald's face. It was twisted and contorted as if it was in great pain. I tried to shake that face out of my brain but all my efforts were not successful. A terrible guilt welled up in me that I had for those few moments in the kitchen completely forgot about my husband.
"Shaken, twisted by the thought, only one thing was there to alleviate my crime; the body of the child. I turned to him and pressed my lips against his flesh. He moaned. I was like a beast turned loose, all of my emotions were focused on that frail form, only the body could ease my guilt once again.
"My lips and tongue were insatiable. They wandered over every inch of his body. They sucked the very despair and suffering from his mind and soul. They were like two pincers which spread a beneficent fever, rooting out the evil of poverty and homelessness.
"Then my lips were at his face. I parted his lips with my tongue and thrust it in. I saw his eyes. How can I explain them? They looked at me like a goddess. Each eye spoke a thousand words with silence. I could not stand those eyes. I was no goddess. I had to change them, to show them the truth. Grabbing his head by the hair, I pulled his face savagely until it rested between my legs, almost smothering in the soft, rich hair.
"He fought to breathe, and in that fight, a snake darted into the forbidden fruit, making me squirm and move, making me melt under the barbed pressure from the child's coated tongue.
"The boy was enraged. He threw me back on the bed. He forced my legs apart and in one swift moment, sent his maleness on a course of retribution, sent it deep into the very source of all my life, deeper and deeper, in magnificent thrusts, until my eyes were closed and mind reeled from vision to vision.
"Then everything dissolved into a ride into that other world, where flesh is supreme. I clutched his shoulder blades, thin as they were, and we moved frantically together, joining with a fury that I had never thought myself capable of exhibiting.
"When it poured out, I was ready to receive it. I was ready to catch in my body the heat and the glory of the male juice. I quivered once and was still.
"Twenty minutes later the phone rang. I picked it up. The base commander was on the wire. He said that he was calling all the wives of the sub crew to let them know that radio contact had been reestablished and the sub was coming home. I just sat there, unable to answer him, the tears streaming down my eyes.
"Nick knew. He stood up and walked to me. He opened my robe. Bending over, he kissed my naked breast with delicacy. He took the nipple and rolled it across the tongue, his eyes closed, his breathing heavily. Then, without another word, he released my breast and walked through the door. I watched him leave. Donald was coming home."
The reader will be able to see, immediately, the uniqueness of this case. It was restricted to one evening and was never repeated. It had the quality of a dream and because of that quality, it did not have a lasting effect upon Ruth.
This case dramatically points out how a woman, under the extreme duress of a husband missing at sea, can construct elaborate rationals to satisfy primeval urges.