Cinderella Liberty — Darryl Ponicsan

We first meet John Baggs, YN 2, U.S. Navy, soaking his very sore backside in a sitz bath at sea, aboard the USS Begonia. This is Baggs' second enlistment. He's an unlikely sailor -- onetime physics major, possible minister -- but the Navy's a lot preferable to science or the pulpit, despite its absurdities, and he can still enjoy the pleasure of sins he wasn't willing to re­nounce.

Then came the day he presented his ail­ment to the ship's doctor and was told he needed surgery and a thirty-day stay at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Vir­ginia. Not for John Baggs a conventional hospitalization, discharge, and return to duty. In the ultimate bureaucratic snafu, the Navy loses Baggs' records. He is offi­cially nonexistent. He can't be discharged from the hospital -- or transferred, re­assigned, promoted, or paid. He seems condemned forever to his hospital niche though he's long since recovered.

His superiors take pity on his limbo after a while and grant Baggs Cinderella liberty -- off each evening and from noon on weekends, as long as he checks into his hospital bed by midnight. But it's a lonely existence for a penniless sailor until he meets bargirl Maggie Paul. Feckless, street­wise Maggie and her three children become John Baggs' life for a few hours each day. It is a crazy idyll that this impromptu family shapes for a few months -- and, as idylls must, it ends.

But not for keeps, and not in any way one might have imagined. For John Baggs, nonperson, becomes a person again -- if not John Baggs. Instant, permanent fatherhood accompanies his new identity in an ending so raucous and touching that the reader finishes these pages in a surge of laughter and tears.

Darryl Ponicsan's novel is a gusty de­light.