Annapolis, page 53
“I can’t do it,” Gabriel Shank said to the city editor.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I won’t draw pictures that drag us into a war.”
“What’s the matter, Shank?” said a reporter who had just joined the paper. “You don’t like a good war now and then?”
“There’s no such thing as a good war. And no such thing as a bad peace. Ben Franklin said that.” Gabriel pivoted on his cane and went thumping across the city room.
By the time the evening edition appeared, he was out of a job.
As his wife Alexandra said, it wasn’t the first time.
The evening headline read: “War! Maine Destroyed by Spanish; This Proved Absolutely by Discovery of Torpedo Hole.” It was all rumor.
IN HIS OFFICE, Abraham Stafford reread the latest cable from Captain Sigsbee of the Maine: probably the maine destroyed by mine, perhaps by accident. i surmise that her berth was planted previous to her arrival, perhaps long ago.
But why? And who could have known in advance that the American battleship would be moored to buoy number five?
The Spanish government had promised to soften its stance. The rebel junta was getting what it wanted. It did not make sense.
Abraham Stafford brooded all the way back to the navy yard.
His wife would have preferred to be living at the Portland or at Dupont Circle, but her family was not so well off as she allowed people to believe. Besides, in naval society, families who set themselves apart were asking to be ignored. And Abraham was like most naval officers—happiest in the society of other officers.
In the Academy, midshipmen were trained to believe that they were a breed apart. There were never more than a hundred in a class. They were held to high standards of academic and physical rigor. They wore uniforms with collars that looked almost clerical, except for the rank insignia. They attended regular Episcopal services, whether they were Episcopalian or not. They were bound by a code of honor that was forged in the classroom, deepened on training cruises, and sharpened by rituals, from color parades to midnight hazings. And after they graduated, all of them were united in their ambition for rank. Ambition, Abraham always told his son, Will, was the thing that would make a better navy and a better country.
Little Katherine greeted her father at the door, but when he bent to kiss her, she went racing off, shouting, “No kisses for the navy!”
With a great gust of laughter, he chased her down the hallway, through the living room, then the dining room, into the—
His mother. He stopped and turned back to the living room.
“Is it Pa?”
“No. He’s only vomited a little blood this week.” Eve Stafford had grown in stature as she aged. Straight skirts, high-necked blouses with puffed sleeves, hair piled in a swirl atop her head—these flattered her far more than the fashions of her youth.
“Your father doesn’t think that the Maine was destroyed by a mine,” said Julia with a frozen smile. “He would deny his son the chance for glory.”
“He’s trying to stop a war, dear.” Eve handed her son an envelope.
It contained a cross-section sketch of the Maine, showing all of the frames—the vertical structural members that formed walls and compartments. At frame 32, Engineer George Stafford had sketched coal bunker A-16. From frames 30 to 18 were three magazines: A-6-M, A-9-M, and A-14-M.
“I said it when we toured her,” George Stafford had written. “She was badly designed. A low-smoldering fire in the coal bunker heats the ammunition in A-14-M, the ship blows up, and we’re at war.”
“Your father still follows the world from his bedroom in the Fine Folly,” said Eve. “He thinks we should stop the rush toward war.”
“But these Spanish are butchers,” said Julia. “They have it coming.”
Eve looked at her son. “Don’t you know this Roosevelt?”
“He sure does,” said Will, who was sitting in the corner, reading the latest reports in the newspaper. He was now twelve, a splatter of pimples on his chin and a serious brow just forming. “Pa rides horses with Roosevelt in Rock Creek Park. He shoots grouse with him, too. He even uses the word ‘bully’ sometimes.”
“From what I read,” said Eve, “Roosevelt thinks this war will be a bully thing.”
“It will be… won’t it?” asked the boy. “A chance to show what we’re made of, so that the Japanese and Germans and British will—”
“Remind me, sometime, to tell you about my days as a nurse in the Civil War. Have you ever seen a man with burns from a ruptured steam valve, dear?”
“Grandmother Stafford,” said Julia, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate thing to be telling a boy about… especially just before dinner.”
“But our sons for the sea must know the truth, mustn’t they?”
THAT NIGHT, AFTER they had taken his mother back to Union Station to catch the Annapolis train, Julia asked Abraham what he would do with his father’s letter.
“Give it to Roosevelt.”
“He’s the path to advancement, Abraham—a sea command in wartime. Think before you dampen his enthusiasm with something like this.”
Abraham thought hard and decided that Roosevelt would want to hear every opinion. So the next morning he put his father’s sketch on Roosevelt’s desk.
“The coal-fire theory.” Roosevelt studied the plan. “We’ve been hearing this for three days. It’s what Secretary Long believes. It’s what McKinley hopes.”
“My father argues the facts, sir. As you know, he was a respected engineer.”
“No one respects engineers more than I do. But the last thing we want to learn is that this was the result of incompetence aboard one of our ships.”
“Yes, sir… er, no, sir.”
“We may never know for certain, but I believe the Maine was sunk by an act of dirty Spanish treachery. I’d give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow.”
Abraham gathered up the papers.
Roosevelt came around the desk and looked into Abraham’s eyes. “We’re also jingoes, you and I. We want a war. We want to prove that what we’ve been trying to do here is the best thing for this country.”
“Aye, sir.” Abraham put his father’s theories away and hoped for war.
BUT OVER THE next week, others tried to avert war while the assistant secretary and his young naval assistant champed at the bit.
Diplomatic notes were exchanged. A naval board of inquiry went to Havana to determine the cause of the explosion. Navy Secretary John Long—a cautious, slow-moving old man—moved slowly and acted cautiously. President McKinley, a Civil War veteran, said, “I have been through one war. I have seen the dead pile up, and I do not want to see another.”
Roosevelt muttered to Abraham Stafford, “The president has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”
And then Secretary Long took a Friday afternoon off.
For a few hours the high-mettled horse was given his head. So he kicked in the stall, jumped the fence, and all but galloped into war in a single day.
To a naval officer, raised from childhood in the belief that the chain of command was sacrosanct, what Roosevelt did seemed, at best, an act of high-principled arrogance. At worst, it was mutiny. But Abraham Stafford went along with it because Roosevelt was his superior… and the horse that was carrying him higher.
Roosevelt meant to remedy, in one afternoon, all the foot-dragging he had seen in the ten days since the Maine had exploded. He fired messages around the globe: coaling instructions to American ships on station; requisitions for ammunition; orders to move personnel; orders to purchase auxiliary vessels for the war; requests for congressional appropriations. And this to Commodore Dewey of the Asiatic squadron:
ORDER THE SQUADRON TO HONG KONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OF DECLARATION OF WAR WITH SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT SPANISH SQUADRON WILL NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST. THEN COMMENCE OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.
Abraham Stafford had never seen a performance like it.
The truth was, no one had.
The next day, Secretary Long hurried back to work, even though it was a Saturday, and he was heard to confide to his personal secretary, “Roosevelt came near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine. The very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon.”
When these remarks found their way back to Roosevelt, he told Abraham only this: “Someday they’ll understand.”
“I think Secretary Long understands already,” said Abraham. “He hasn’t countermanded any of your orders, yet.”
Roosevelt looked out the window at the White House. “War has to come. When it does, the navy will be ready.”
iv
Ethan Stafford
Once he was out of Cuba, it took him a week to clear up affairs in London. Then the man known as George Thomas disappeared.
He could have done it sooner, of course. In late 1865, charges of piracy had been dismissed against Semmes, and the Confederate raiders were free to come home. But by then he had become George Thomas, weapons expert for hire, and he was riding through the Mexican rebellion against Maximilian. In 1872, he was once more Ethan Stafford, sailing on the Virginius. In 1889, George Thomas ran guns to the Fenian rebels of Ireland. In between, he was here, he was there, working for this side or that, or living large in London.
But someday, someone who knew that George Thomas was to have died in the Inglaterra might come to London to finish the job. And he was too old for that.
Besides, he had made a promise to a dying man who believed that private diplomacy could stand against the storm that was about to smash a crumbling empire.
Stopping the war was a lost cause, and Ethan Stafford did not believe in lost causes. But he had never lost his belief that there were smarter ways than war to get what we wanted. In a strange way, that was why he had spent his life doing what he did.
For his return to America, he wore a four-button gray suit and a black derby. He also shaved off his beard, and beneath the white whiskers, he looked surprisingly youthful. Appropriate, he thought, when going back to the scenes of his youth.
But any thoughts of settling in Annapolis were dispelled in his walk from the depot to the Fine Folly. Crabtown was what they called it now, a sleepy little place on the banks of the Naval Academy, with March mud squirting up between the cobblestones and nothing much happening, beyond the oyster shucking at the waterfront and the debates at State Circle.
In the protected gardens before the Fine Folly, the crocuses were already blossoming and the magnolia buds were fat. Ethan hardly noticed the weeds, the peeling paint, and the crumbling mortar between the bricks, perhaps because he had not seen this grand old house in many years.
Then he saw the black crepe hung around the doorframe.
His father, his mother, his half-brother Cecil, his aunt Antonia had all passed through the portals of Saint Anne’s without him. Cousin Jack Browne had been lost at sea. Now his half brother George had joined those other links to the past, mourned that morning at Saint Anne’s, bound for burial that afternoon at Stafford Hall. So Ethan rented a small steamer that got him down to the Patuxent a half hour after the funeral flotilla.
There was no hint of spring here, not in the brown fields or bare trees, not in the cold rising off the river, not in the crowd of people huddled by the family plot or the priest reading over the coffin.
Ethan did not cut straight across the field to the plot. He had long ago learned to come into things quietly. So he went up the rolling road, past the slave huts that now housed sharecroppers, then along the veranda at the back of the house.
Several officers and midshipmen stood in their greatcoats like a navy-blue wall around the civilian mourners. Ethan chose a broad navy back to stand behind so that he would not attract the attention of those seated at the grave—Eve and her bachelor son, Jacob; Abraham and his wife, Julia; and Abraham’s two children, whom George had written about so proudly.
But Ethan could not avoid being noticed.
Robby Parrish, whom he had not seen since the Alabama stopped the East Wind, shot him a wink, but Robby had been so worn by growing tobacco in the exhausted Patuxent soil that the wink was the only thing about him Ethan recognized.
And then Alexandra caught his eye. Her gaze reached across the open grave and across all the years, and filled him with more regret than his brother’s death.
IT WAS A strange evening.
But Ethan was no stranger to strange evenings, and he sailed through this one, smoothly riding the conversational breezes from the dining room buffet through the study to the great hall.
He offered condolences to Eve and her sons. He showed a bit of avuncular pride to Abraham’s two children. He chatted like an old shipmate with Robby Parrish. But he stayed well to windward of Alexandra and Gabriel Shank. He talked of the weather as they sailed by. But more talk would be uncomfortable, even now.
What he wanted was to get Abraham alone, which he accomplished for a few moments in the study.
“I’m surprised to see you, Ethan,” said Abraham with the wariness he had shown his shadowy uncle on the rare occasions when they had met. “Someone who brokers arms should be selling French seventy-fives to Spain right now.”
“I’m out of that line of work. I always believed that strong neighbors made good neighbors. Give everybody guns and everybody gets along. But nations are like people. When they have weapons, they use them.”
“So what brings you home?”
Ethan looked around the study, still painted the color of blood soaking into a wooden deck. “Stopping this war.”
“That puts us at cross purposes. I’m trying to get it started.”
“If you tell that damn cowboy Roosevelt that the explosion of the Maine was an accident, you might stop it.”
“The coal-fire theory? We’ve been hearing that for two weeks.”
“It’s not just a theory. A trusted functionary in the Spanish government told me two hours after it happened: his government didn’t do it. And I know for a fact that the rebels didn’t get the chance.”
“For a fact?” Abraham set his coffee cup on the mantel.
“I was supposed to do it for them.”
“You were supposed to kill over two hundred American sailors?”
“I planned something much smaller.”
“You’re an arms expert who doesn’t like war, yet you schemed to bring America into a war that you now hope to stop.”
Ethan shrugged. “I’m a man of contradictions.”
“If this story is the truth, Uncle, why don’t you tell it yourself?”
“Would anyone listen to an arms expert who doesn’t like war?”
Just then a towheaded boy scuttled into the room—Robby Parrish’s youngest son, Charlie. “Did you see any kids come through here, Cap’n?”
“Are you playing hide-and-seek on this solemn occasion?” asked Abraham.
The boy looked down at the floor. “Yes, sir. But—”
And Ethan tousled the boy’s hair. “You kids’ve been good for about as long as kids can be. Uncle George wouldn’t mind if you played a little game.”
The boy took that as permission to skedaddle, and quick.
Abraham turned his gaze to Ethan again. “Did Uncle George know you were some sort of agent provocateur?”
“I’m a man with vital information. I give it to you.”
“What am I to do with it?”
“The right thing. It might help you to climb a few rungs on the ladder of rank.”
“I can fend for myself on that score,” said Abraham stiffly. “I don’t need the help of a long-lost uncle.”
“I’ll remember that.” Ethan took out a cigar. “But you remember that there’s no honor in fighting if you can talk, son.”
“You can’t know much about what happened in this room, then.”
“The man who died in this room did the right thing. Sometimes that means defending your family. Now it means stopping a war. So there”—Ethan lit his cigar and gave Abraham a grin—“I’ve fulfilled my pledge to a dying man. Now excuse me while I go and sit with your mother.”
Abraham weighed Ethan’s words, reconsidered his father’s last letter, considered the responsibility that this old Confederate had dropped on him with a grin, as though he did not care in the least what Abraham did with it. Then he weighed Roosevelt’s words—“Someday they’ll understand”—and decided that Roosevelt’s words weighed more than Ethan’s. Then he went off to cut himself a piece of cake.
The old study was now empty… but for two kids hidden inside the wall. The closet door swung open and Will Stafford stepped out. He was a little old for hide-and-seek, but it had been a long day, and even a disciplined boy needed some fun.
His sister dropped down right after him. “What were they talking about?”
“War… or honor… I think,” said Will.
“Oh… okay. C’mon, before Charlie Parrish finds us.”
THE WIND KICKED up in the middle of the night.
The old house creaked. The branches of a big oak scratched at the windows of the room where Ethan lay awake, the same room where he had lain awake as a boy, imagining his great-grandfather and the pirates.
Legends and ghosts… and a noisy old house.
He slipped out of bed, tiptoed downstairs, and stepped outside.
High nights, he called these, when the wind was a living presence and the clouds raced across the moon, sending splashes of silver and dark shadow skittering over the landscape.
He felt like a ghost himself—a little boy, sneaking out to fish before the sun was up, a young man galloping home from Lexie Parrish’s hayloft, a midshipman sharing a flask with the brother they had buried that day.
He wandered back to the grave plots, where the fresh earth was rounded up over George Stafford and the old headstones looked like jagged teeth around it.
