Evan Hunter - Sons

The next day, the 33rd Division on our right was relieved by the French 15th Colonial, who brought in mail for us, and with it Clara’s three letters. I had not cried when Timothy Bear was killed. There is something in war, you do not cry, it is almost as if the person never existed. But now, reading Clara’s letters, I began to weep because I was certain I would lose Nancy, too, and then nothing in the world would matter. They thought I was shell-shocked at first. I cried all during the attacks on La Mi-Noel and the Bois de Forêt and the small woods southwest of Clery-le-Grand, cried throughout the mopping-up operations on October 24. I did not stop crying until we were relieved by the 5th Division on October 27, and sent back to Montfaucon, leaving our artillery behind in support.

A letter from Eau Fraiche was waiting for me upon my arrival there.

Sunday, October 20

Hello, darling,

Clara says she’s been afraid to write to you for almost a week, so let me assure you here and now that I am alive and well and back home again and in receipt of two letters from you, so I know that you’re safe, too, and that’s all that matters to me.

They thought I was dying.

I’ll tell you something, Bert, I thought so, too!

Oh boy, Bert, what a time it was! I guess Clara told you it started with an awful headache which I didn’t pay any mind to because I figured it was caused by all the worry over Daddy and everything. But the next morning I tried to get out of bed and almost fell on the floor, I was so dizzy. And there was a terrible knife pain behind my eyes, as if someone was inside trying to cut his way out! Mother took my temperature, and I seemed to be all right, but that night it shot up from normal to a hundred and three and Dr. Henning packed me off to McIver. (They are now calling people like Daddy and me, who go to the emergency hospital and manage to get out of it alive, “McIver Survivors.”) I didn’t think I would make it, Bert. I kept having terrible nightmares, all about Hell and being burned alive at the stake, and this went on for more than a week, which is quite unusual since if you’re going to get well at all it usually takes three or four days for the fever to pass. Dr. Henning tells me, though, that I also had a touch of encephalitis, and that I’m “a very lucky little girl.”

I have to tell you something, Bert.

I can’t hear too well in my right ear. Dr. Henning says this was caused by the infection in the auditory center, and may be temporary or permanent, but that in any event it is a small price to pay. I feel terrible about it because I don’t think it’s exactly feminine to be saying “How’s that?” all the time, do you? Will you still love me if I have to carry around a horn?

Clara is here with some aspirin and some hot milk, so I’d better take it and close the light. She has been an absolute dear all through this. I may even let her read your next letter (if you promise not to say any of those awful things in it!) Seriously, Bert, I think it might be a good idea if you wrote to her personally, if you have the time, that is. She was so worried that she’d done the wrong thing in telling you I was sick, and I know a reassuring word from you would set her mind at ease.

Keep safe and well, Bert, and let’s hope the war will soon be over as they say it will be. Then you can come home and marry me, and we will live happily ever after, okay?

I love you,

The train had come down from Boston, and it was jam-packed when it stopped at New Haven. She had her crap spread out all over the seat, two valises, a guitar, and a duffle bag, as if she were going on a grand tour of the Bahamas instead of probably just home for the Thanksgiving weekend. I had conic through three cars looking for a seat, and when I spotted her living in the luxury of this little nest she’d built, I stopped and said, “Excuse me, is this taken?”

She had dark brown eyes and long black hair parted in the middle of her head, falling away straight on both sides of her face, framing an oval that gave a first impression of being too intensely white, lips without lipstick, checks high and a bit too Vogue-ish, a finely sculpted nose and a firm chin with a barely perceptible cleft. The look she gave me was one of extreme patience directed at a moron, her glance clearly saying Can’t you see it’s taken?

“Well, is it?” I asked.

“I’ve got my stuff on it,” she answered. Her voice sounded New Canaan or mid-Eighties Park Avenue. It rankled immediately.

“I see that,” I said, “but is anyone sitting here?”

“I’m sitting here.”

“Besides you.”

“No.”

“Then would you mind putting your stuff up on the rack?”

Her look of patience turned instantly to one of annoyance. I was forcing her to move her furniture out of the apartment just after she’d painted and settled in. She turned the look off, got up without so much as glancing at me again, lifted the guitar onto the rack and then reached for the heavy duffle.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

“Don’t bother,” she said.

She was wearing sandals and tight chinos, and I discovered her backside as she lifted the duffle up onto the rack with a great show of delicate college girl maidenhood being strained to its physical limits. The gray sweatshirt she had on over the chinos rode up as she lifted one of the valises, revealing a well-defined spine, the halves of her back curving into it like a pale ripe apple into its stem. She turned to pick up the other valise, and I saw MIT’s seal on the front of the sweatshirt, flanked by a rounded pair of breasts too freely moving to have been confined by a bra. She saw my goofy leer, made a face, hoisted the valise up onto the rack, slid back into the seat, cupped her chin in her hand, and stared through the window.

“Thank you,” I said.

She did not answer.

“Look,” I said, “your bags didn’t pay for a seat, you know.”

“I moved them, didn’t I?” she said, without turning from the window.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, but she still did not turn from the window.

“You coming down from Radcliffe?” I said.

“What gives you that impression?” she said, and turned from the window at last, and assumed again that patient expression of someone talking to a cretin.

“You sound like a Radcliffe girl.”

“And just how do Radcliffe girls sound?” she asked, so annoyed by my presence on her turf, and so confident of her own allure in sweatshirt and chinos, brown eyes burning with a low, angry, smoky intensity, white face pale against the cascading black hair, completely stepping down several levels in the social strata by deigning to utter in her New Canaan nasal twang anything at all to someone like me, who should have been up a tree someplace eating unpeeled bananas instead of trying to start a conversation with the WASP princess of the western world. I was already half in love with her.

“Radcliffe girls sound rude and surly and sarcastic,” I said. “So do Yalies,” she said.

"Are you from Radcliffe?”

“No, I’m from B. U.”

“Is that a school?”

“Ha-ha,” she said. “You’re from Yale, all right.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell,” she said in dismissal, and turned to look through the window again, pulling her long legs up under her.

“Must be fascinating, watching all those telephone poles go by,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“My name’s Wat Tyler,” I said.

She turned to me with a reproachful look. Certain she had tipped to a put-on, she said, “Mine’s Anne of Bohemia.”