The Brooklyn Navy Yard is the first consequential naval setting in Willie Keith’s service: there, a routine medical check becomes an anxious test of whether he will be allowed to remain in the Navy. The episode presents the yard as a threshold between the military identity Willie enjoys displaying and the institutional judgment that could take it away.

Arrival and Medical Screening

On his second day in the Navy, Willie rode the subway to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in his blue apprentice seaman raincoat, pleased by the attention his uniform attracted. He had been sent for checks of his pulse and lordosis. Outside the yard gates, he counted his pulse at eighty-six, waited and tried again, and found it had risen to ninety-four. Worried that his body might disqualify him, he went to a nearby drugstore and took a double dose of bromide before proceeding to Captain Grimm’s office for the final check.

Captain Grimm’s Office

The office places Willie’s personal anxiety inside the Navy’s administrative routine. Captain Grimm was occupied with paperwork and complaints about the accounting of morphine when Willie arrived. After looking over Willie’s papers, he recorded that the mild lordosis was well compensated and the pulse normal, discarded a red-lettered memo, and returned the record. His approval preserved Willie’s place in the service; the check that had seemed capable of ending his naval career instead became its first reprieve.

Narrative Significance

The yard’s role in the novel is concentrated in this entry episode rather than in a sequence of later events. Willie arrives relishing the visible signs of military life, then discovers how much his continued service depends on an unglamorous medical assessment and the judgment of an officer. The novel’s prefatory note cautions that the Caine and the people and events aboard it are fictional; the yard episode, by contrast, anchors Willie’s passage into service in a named naval setting.