Chapter 6 - The Chapel of the Angels
The chapel at Portsmouth Naval Hospital had seven stained-glass windows that showed various historical moments when people had almost drowned and hadn't: Saint Paul on the beach at Malta, the disciples in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, and an anonymous naval aviator from the Second World War floating in a yellow Mae West off the coast of Truk Lagoon.
It was eleven-thirty at night. The room smelled of old carpet, furniture polish, and the cold, damp stone of the foundation that sat eighty yards from the river.
Hugh Alden sat in the third pew on the gospel side, directly beneath the light from a six-armed brass chandelier that had three burnt-out bulbs. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket; it was folded neatly on the wooden bench beside him, the satin lapels facing inward to keep the dust off the cloth. He was wearing his white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up two turns—the old naval aviator’s roll, tight and narrow below the elbow—and his hands were clasped between his knees like those of an ensign waiting for the results of his primary flight check.
The heels of my low-quarters made a hard, dry clack against the center aisle linoleum.
He didn't turn around immediately. He waited until I was three feet from the end of the pew, my shadow cutting across the open hymnbook in the rack before him, before he lifted his chin.
His face looked different in the yellow light. The broad, aggressive jawline that had dominated forty years of wardroom photographs had settled into two loose folds of skin along his neck, and his eyes—the clear, cold gray eyes that could spot an unlighted buoy at three miles—were watery around the lids, red-veined from the smoke and the four scotches he had drunk before the Admiral took his daughter away.
He looked at my collars.
He looked at the gold oak leaves. Then his gaze dropped to the blue ribbon with the white stripe.
He had never won the Navy Cross. He had three Air Medals, the Legion of Merit with the combat distinguishing device, and the Meritorious Service Medal from his time as the operations officer on the Nimitz, but he had never held the blue ribbon. In our family, the only person who had held it was his uncle, who had died on a cruiser off Guadalcanal in nineteen-forty-two.
“You’re wearing the uniform,” he said. His voice was cracked, like an old speaker cone that had taken too much bass.
“Commander Vance had it in the car,” I said.
“Judith Carrow always was theatrical,” he said to the altar. “Even in Monterey. She used to bring the whole section to attention when the instructor walked in five seconds early. She thinks the Navy is a church.”
“The Navy is an organization that runs on high-pressure steam, Dad,” I said. I didn't sit down. I stood in the aisle, my hands resting behind my back in the parade-rest position that was the only way my right shoulder didn't ache when I was cold. “If the valves don't hold, the church burns down.”
He reached out and touched the edge of the pew with his right thumb, tracing the grain of the white pine.
“Marin was hysterical,” he said.
“Marin is thirty-six years old,” I said. “And she tore the clothes off my back because I wouldn't help her husband sell garbage to the fleet.”
“She’s your sister, Valerie.”
“She’s a stranger who shares my DNA and thinks my service was a personal insult to her lifestyle,” I said. “And you let her do it. You sat six feet away and you looked at the window because you were embarrassed that your daughter had skin that didn't look like a magazine cover.”
Hugh Alden’s shoulders hitched once, a tiny, involuntary movement that was the closest he had come to crying since his mother died in nineteen-ninety-two.
“I was an air wing commander,” he said, and for the first time, the words sounded small, like a child reciting a poem he had forgotten the middle stanza of. “I had eighty-four aircraft and fifteen hundred men under my signature. When an aircraft went over the side, we didn't hold memorial services on the flight deck during launch cycles. We scrubbed the grease off the catapult, we brought the next bird up from the hangar bay, and we launched the strike. You don't linger on the casualties, Valerie. It ruins the unit’s focus.”
“I wasn't an aircraft, Dad,” I said. “I was your daughter.”
He looked up at me then. Really looked at me.
His eyes traveled from the gold oak leaves to the scar that ran up the side of my neck, where the skin was still white and shiny under the collar, to the way my right arm hung an inch higher than the left because the muscle had never completely released its grip on the bone.
“You never asked,” I whispered.
“What?”
“In five years,” I said, and the words were so quiet they seemed to stay between the pine pews, “you never once asked me what it sounded like down there. You never asked me how heavy Ruiz was. You never asked me if the skin hurt when the wind blew through the window in Texas. You asked me why I didn't check the reach-rods. You asked me if the medical board would let me stay on the lieutenant commander list.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. His hands stayed on his knees, but the fingers were twitching against the gray wool of his trousers, the nails clicking softly against the fabric.
“The Admiral says the Daniel Ruiz is commissioning tomorrow,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She asked you to be on the platform?”
“She told me to be on the platform,” I corrected him. “There’s a difference.”
He looked at his shoes. The black patent leather of his formal pumps was dull with dust from the parking lot, with a single smear of dried gray mud across the left welt where he had stepped off the curb when the police car took Marin away.
“Your mother wouldn't have liked this,” he murmured.
“Mother spent forty years making sure your shirts had three inches of starch and your medals didn't tarnish,” I said. “She didn't know what the Navy was either, Dad. She just liked the white gloves at the change of command.”
I took two steps toward the side door, where the red exit light cast a dull, bloody square across the linoleum.
“Valerie,” he called out.
I stopped with my hand on the brass push-bar.
“Are you coming back to the house?” he asked. “The... the room is still there. Your books from the academy are on the shelf. I haven't touched them.”
I looked back at him across the three rows of empty pews.
He was sitting in the pool of yellow light, with his medals on his lapel and his sleeves rolled up, looking like a photograph from an old cruise book that had been left in the damp until the corners curled.
“No, Dad,” I said. “I’m not coming back to the house.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Washington,” I said. “The Admiral has a desk in the operations directorate that needs an engineer who knows how to read an audit report. And after that, I have a ship to commission.”
I pushed the bar.
May you like
The cold night air came through the gap with a sharp, salt-heavy smell that cleared the incense and the furniture polish out of my lungs in three seconds.
The door clicked shut behind me, the latch seating with the heavy, clean sound of an iron gate closing on a drydock after the water has already gone back to the sea.
