The Brooklyn Navy Yard serves as an early threshold in Willie Keith’s naval career: there, a medical examination threatens to exclude him from the service he has just decided he truly wants to join. The episode brings his performed confidence as a new sailor into contact with the Navy’s practical standards for admitting him.

Medical Examination and Naval Identity

On his second day in the Navy, Willie rides the subway to the Brooklyn Navy Yard wearing his blue apprentice seaman raincoat. He enjoys the attention it brings, comparing the apparent dash of his bell-bottom trousers to the beer jackets he wore at Princeton. His appointment is less glamorous: the Navy is checking his pulse and lordosis, and he fears that a bodily measurement could strip away the naval identity he has begun to relish.

Outside the Yard’s gates, Willie counts his pulse at eighty-six, waits, and finds it has risen to ninety-four. Worried that anxiety will make him fail, he goes to a drugstore and takes a double bromide, one dose to quiet his conscience and the other to settle his pulse. At Captain Grimm’s office, the reading has fallen to seventy-five, and Willie feels relaxed enough to go in.

Captain Grimm’s Decision

Inside, Willie encounters Captain Grimm, a tired-looking physician occupied with complaints about the accounting of morphine. After looking over Willie’s papers, Grimm initially invokes the Navy’s standards and notes that Navy casualties have exceeded Army casualties in the war so far. Willie answers that he wants to be a Navy man, realizing only after he says it that he means it.

Grimm responds with goodwill and records Willie’s condition as mild lordosis, well compensated, with a normal pulse. He discards the red-lettered memo that might have threatened Willie’s acceptance and returns the other papers. Rather than suffer quietly when something seems unreasonable, Grimm advises him to speak up. The decision lets Willie continue in the service; back at Furnald Hall, the pharmacist’s mate Warner reacts with disappointment when he sees that Willie has passed.

A Threshold into Service

The Yard’s importance in this episode lies in the narrowness of the passage it represents. Willie arrives savoring the visible signs of naval status, yet his place in the Navy still depends on an examination and a written medical judgment. His anxious effort to control his pulse shows how fragile that new identity feels; Grimm’s decision converts it from costume and aspiration into an accepted status.

Willie later thinks his career may have been saved because Grimm felt ashamed at having kept a patient waiting for eight hours. The novel presents this as Willie’s own explanation, not as a stated reason for the doctor’s decision. In the scene itself, the decisive exchange is Willie’s sincere declaration of commitment and Grimm’s favorable entry in the record.