Pete Hamill - Loving Women

On Friday, the mail arrived just before noon and there was a pale-blue letter for me. My name, rank, serial number and address were written in the sharp Palmer method script the nuns taught all their young ladies. The serifs of the Rs and Ms were hooked and barbed like thorns protecting roses. Donnie Ray gave me my afternoon off and I went over to the barracks after lunch and took off my shoes and lay down on the bunk to read the letter. A few guys came in and out at the tail end of lunch, slamming locker doors. I read:

Dear Michael

Well I got your letter and I’m sorry I took so long to answer but it was busy here after the holiday’s as you can imagine. It was good to here from you. You must be settleing in their by now and everybody here wishes they were there in sunny Fla.

Just after you left, we had to go in on our vacation and get our pictures done for the yearbook. They wont be ready for a while but we’ll have them before graduation, so I’ll have to wait a while until I can send you one. That way I’ll look halfway descent not like a snapshot.

Its real cold here, lot’s of snow since you left. Its all turned to slush tho so its really rotten out and very bad for walking. Everybodys been staying home most of the time. I went down Stevens Lunchanette the other day just to have a coke with Betty K. but none of the crowd was there. Almost everybody in the Army or Navy now and Mike Fishetti went in the Marine’s. Even the Sander’s or the Prospect on a Fr. or Sat. night are half empty. Nobody is sure why they are still joining up because it says in the paper’s that as soon as Eisenhower has a chance, then the war is over. Everybody hope’s so. But its strange they are still joining up, the guys, I mean.

I heard they are going to name an American legion post for Buddy Tiernan. His mother is still a wreck. She just cant believe he got killed in Korea and she holds Truman and the other communists responsable. She says she think’s hes a prisoner over their, in China maybe, and they will fined him when the war is over. She look’s like a zombie. And Carol Wells is even worse. You know, she was suppose to marry Buddy when he got back but now most people think it will never happen.

Michael I hope you understand everything now. I didn’t want to hurt you you know that. I just wanted to go out with you not go steady. I guess its my fault because I didn’t make myself clear. And I was worried you wouldnt respect me for all the other things. So I stayed with you until you went away. But were too young to get all tied up with each other in a perminent way. I read your letter over and over and it made me cry. You say some thing’s so beautiful sometimes, like a poet almost. But some of the thing’s you said like about Paris and all that I dont know what to say about that. I never thought about thing’s like that before I met you and I dont know what I’m suppose to feel. Anyway your their and I’m here and theres nothing to be done about it for now is there?

I just don’t want you to think bad about me. I know you think I cheated on you when I went out with Charlie Templeton but Michael I never would do what we did with anyone else believe me and also I never said I was going steady with you so how could I be cheating on you? We had a thing that was special but maybe it was a mistake. I think of you as a good friend and I hope you know that. Charlie is a freind too but not like we were and were not going Steady (me and Charlie) no matter what you here from the rotten gossips. I always try and think of the good time’s and hope you do too.

I hope your happy down there in sunny Fla. Maybe the best thing that could happen is that you find a real nice girl down their. And we could always be good friends right?

Love,

Maureen

PS Eddie Terrell got married out in Calif, and is going to stay there with his bride when he get’s out of the Marine’s.

I lay back on the bunk and closed my eyes and for the first time in weeks, I was back in Brooklyn. I saw myself on a summer evening leaving the tenement on Seventh Avenue to walk to Maureen’s house on the far side of the hill. I walked past the red brick hulk of The Factory, where my father worked, and then past the bar Maureen’s father owned. I crossed the avenue at 14th Street and walked under the marquee of the Minerva (where Drums was always playing on a double bill with Four Feathers ) and up along the brick ramparts of the 14th Regiment Armory and the synagogue on the other side of the street (where I’d served as the Shabbas goy one year). I passed the Syrian grocery store and walked under the trees along the street that ended at the park. I stopped there, dazed by the lights of the Sanders movie house, the crowded bars of Bartel Pritchard Square, the clanging of the trolley cars, the shouts of the men selling the News and Mirror , two cents each, and looked at all the crowded benches along the side of the park and felt the arctic blast of the air conditioning from the movie house, the coldest in all the world. The sight of this place always gave me a thrill.

For an hour, I’d stand there with my friends, joking, stalling, shadowboxing, hanging out. And then I’d move off, walking more quickly down the parkside to the other end of The Neighborhood (a separate neighborhood, really), where the houses were solid and safe and there were no tenements to block the sky or the breeze or change the light on summer afternoons. I went there in the uniform of Seventh Avenue, where I came from: pegged pants and thick-soled Flagg Bros, shoes. The way I dressed had nothing to do with Maureen’s neighborhood, its trimmed gardens and fancy curtains and polished cars parked in driveways. I certainly wasn’t one of them . Her family made that clear the first time they saw me. Her mother looked at my clothes, and retreated upstairs. And her father’s face said the rest: stony, blue-eyed, deeply lined, no humor in the eyes, no understanding, no passion. Only suspicion and contempt. It was the face of a man who might have worked for the English in Dublin, one of the people my mother used to call the Castle Irish. That first night, he studied me like a judge, knowing from my clothes and my posture that I came from the poor Irish of Seventh Avenue. On all later nights I would go up there to see his daughter with anger as strong in my heart as love.

And so the boy I was then, dozing in the Pensacola afternoon, her letter in hand, knew he would probably never take that long summer walk again. Maureen had told him in this letter one more time: What she felt for him was not what he felt for her.

And he thought: Well, the hell with it and the hell with you. Until your goddamned letter arrived, I hadn’t even thought of you, girl, for a couple of weeks. There’s a woman here named Eden Santana. I mean a real woman. More beautiful than you. So to hell with you, with your ignorant writing and your rotten spelling and your stupid grammatical mistakes. I don’t want to hear any gossip about the neighborhood from you anymore. Or this crap about friendship. I was in love with you. I didn’t want to be your goddamned friend. I have friends. I even have friends here, guys you’ll never know. I wanted to love you and for you to love me back … And then thought: Okay, good-bye, so long. See you, girl. Someday you’ll be sorry .

I must have slept then.

Until Sal shouted: “Hey, what’s this! Get up!”

And saw Max and Sal looking down at me.

“That must’ve been some letter,” Sal said. “Had you talking in your sleep.”

I sat up, tucking the letter into my dungarees.

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice letter.”

“Get dressed,” Sal said. “We’re going to church.”