Текст книги "Orphan Train"

Автор книги: Christina Baker Kline

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

The people in the foyer are equally striking. A woman wearing a flat black hat with a net that covers half her face stands at the reception desk with a pile of red leather suitcases, pulling off one long black satin glove and then the other. A white-haired matron carries a fluffy white dog with black button eyes. A man in a morning coat talks on the telephone at the front desk; an older gentleman wearing a monocle, sitting alone on a green love seat, holds a small brown book open in front of his nose. These people look bored, amused, impatient, self-satisfied—but most of all, they look rich. Now I am glad not to be wearing the gaudy, provocative clothing that seems to be drawing stares and whispers to Lil and Em.

Ahead of me, the three of them saunter across the lobby, shrieking with laughter, one of Richard’s arms around Lil’s shoulder and the other cinching Em’s waist. “Hey, Vivie,” Lil calls, glancing back as if suddenly remembering I’m here, “this way!” Richard pulls open the double doors to the bar, throws his hands into the air with a flourish, and ushers Lil and Em, giggling and whispering, inside. He follows, and the doors close slowly behind him.

I slow to a stop in front of the green couches. I’m in no hurry to go in there to be a fifth wheel, treated like I’m hopelessly out of it, old-fashioned and humorless, by the freewheeling Richard. Maybe, I think, I should just walk around for a while and then go back to the rooming house. Since the matinee nothing has felt quite real anyway; it’s been enough of a day for me—much more, certainly, than I’m used to.

I perch on one of the couches, watching people come and go. At the door, now, is a woman in a purple satin dress with cascading brown hair, elegantly nonchalant, waving at the porter with a bejeweled hand as she glides into the foyer. Absorbed in watching her as she floats past me toward the concierge desk, I don’t notice the tall, thin man with blond hair until he is standing in front of me.

His eyes are a piercing blue. “Excuse me, miss,” he says. I wonder if maybe he is going to say something about how I am so obviously out of place, or ask if I need help. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

I look at his golden-blond hair, short in the back but longer in front—nothing like the small-town boys I’m used to, with their hair shorn like sheep. He’s wearing gray pants, a crisp white shirt, and a black tie and carrying a slim attaché case. His fingers are long and tapered.

“I don’t think so.”

“Something about you is . . . very familiar.” He’s staring at me so intently that it makes me blush.

“I—” I stammer. “I really don’t know.”

And then, with a smile playing around his lips, he says, “Forgive me if I’m wrong. But are you—were you—did you come here on a train from New York about ten years ago?”

What? My heart jumps. How does he know that?

“Are you—Niamh?” he asks.

And then I know. “Oh my God—Dutchy, it’s you.”

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1939

Dutchy drops the attaché case as I stand up, and sweeps me into a hug. I feel the ropy hardness of his arms, the warmth of his slightly concave chest, as he holds me tight, tighter than anyone has ever held me. A long embrace in the middle of this fancy lobby is probably inappropriate; people are staring. But for once in my life I don’t care.

He pushes me away to look at my face, touches my cheek, and pulls me close again. Through his chambray shirt I feel his heart racing as fast as mine.

“When you blushed, I knew. You looked just the same.” He runs his hand down my hair, stroking it like a pelt. “Your hair . . . it’s darker. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked for you in a crowd, or thought I saw you from the back.”

“You told me you’d find me,” I say. “Remember? It was the last thing you said.”

“I wanted to—I tried. But I didn’t know where to look. And then so much happened . . .” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Is it really you, Niamh?”

“Well, yes—but I’m not Niamh anymore,” I tell him. “I’m Vivian.”

“I’m not Dutchy, either—or Hans, for that matter. I’m Luke.”

We both start laughing—at the absurdity of our shared experience, the relief of recognition. We cling to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, astonished that neither of us drowned.

The many questions I want to ask render me mute. Before I can even formulate words, Dutchy—Luke—says, “This is crazy, but I have to leave. I have a gig.”

“A ‘gig’ ?”

“I play piano in the bar here. It’s not a terrible job, if nobody gets too drunk.”

“I was just on my way in there,” I tell him. “My friends are waiting for me. They’re probably drunk as we speak.”

He picks up his case. “I wish we could just blow out of here,” he says. “Go somewhere and talk.”

I do too—but I don’t want him to risk his job for me. “I’ll stay till you’re done. We can talk later.”

“It’ll kill me to wait that long.”

When I enter the bar with him, Lil and Em look up, curiosity on their faces. The room is dark and smoky, with plush purple carpeting patterned with flowers and purple leather banquettes filled with people.

“That’s the way to do it, girl!” Richard says. “You sure didn’t waste any time.”

I sink into a chair at their table, order a gin fizz at the waiter’s suggestion, and concentrate on Dutchy’s fingers, which I can see from where I’m sitting, deftly skimming the piano keys. Ducking his head and closing his eyes, he sings in a clear, low voice. He plays Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw and Glen Gray, music that everybody knows—songs like “Little Brown Jug” and “Heaven Can Wait,” rearranged to draw out different meanings—and some old standards for the gray-haired men on bar stools. Every now and then he pulls sheet music from his case, but mostly he seems to play from memory or by ear. A small cluster of older ladies clutching pocketbooks, their hair carefully coiffed, probably on a shopping expedition from some province or suburb, smile and coo when he tinkles the opening of “Moonlight Serenade.”

Conversation washes over me, slips around me, snagging now and then when I’m expected to answer a question or laugh at a joke. I’m not paying attention. How can I? Dutchy is talking to me through the piano, and, as in a dream, I understand his meaning. I have been so alone on this journey, cut off from my past. However hard I try, I will always feel alien and strange. And now I’ve stumbled on a fellow outsider, one who speaks my language without saying a word.

The more people drink, the more requests they make, and the fuller Dutchy’s tip jar grows. Richard’s head is buried in Lil’s neck, and Em is practically sitting in the lap of a gray hair who wandered over from the bar. “Over the Rainbow!” she calls out, several gin fizzes to the wind. “You know that one? From that movie?”

Dutchy nods, smiles, spreads his fingers across the keys. By the way he plays the chords I can tell he’s been asked to sing it before.

He has half an hour left on the clock when Richard makes a show of looking at his watch. “Holy shit, excuse my French,” he says. “It’s late and I got church tomorrow.”

Everyone laughs.

“I’m ready to turn in, too,” Lil says.

Em smirks. “Turn into what?”

“Let’s blow this joint. I gotta get that thing I left in your room,” Richard says to Lil, standing up.

“What thing?” she asks.

“You know. The thing,” he says, winking at Em.

“He’s gotta get the thing, Lil,” Em says drunkenly. “The thing!”

“I didn’t know men were allowed in the rooms,” I say.

Richard rubs his thumb and forefinger together. “A little grease for the wheel keeps the car running, if you get my gist.”

“The desk clerk is easy to bribe,” Lil translates. “Just so you know, in case you want to spend some quality time with dreamboat over there.” She and Em collapse in giggles.

We make a plan to meet in the lobby of the women’s hotel tomorrow at noon, and the four of them stand to leave. And then there’s a change of plans: Richard knows a bar that’s open until two and they go off in search of it, the two girls tottering on their heels and swaying against the men, who seem all too happy to support them.

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, THE STREET OUTSIDE THE HOTEL IS LIT UP but empty, like a stage set before the actors appear. It doesn’t matter that I barely know the man Dutchy has become, know nothing about his family, his adolescence. I don’t care about how it might look to take him back to my room. I just want to spend more time with him.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“More than sure.”

He slips some bills in my hand. “Here, for the clerk. From the tip jar.”

It’s cool enough that Dutchy puts his jacket around my shoulders. His hand in mine as we walk feels like the most natural thing in the world. Through the low buildings, chips of stars glitter in a velvet sky.

At the front desk, the clerk—an older man, now, with a tweed cap tipped over his face—says, “What can I do for you?”

Oddly, I am not at all nervous. “My cousin lives in town. All right to take him up for a visit?”

The clerk looks through the glass door at Dutchy, standing on the sidewalk. “Cousin, huh?”

I slide two dollar bills across the desk. “I appreciate it.”

With his fingertips the clerk pulls the money toward him.

I wave at Dutchy and he opens the door, salutes the clerk, and follows me into the elevator.

IN THE STRANGE, SHADOWED LIGHTING OF MY SMALL ROOM DUTCHY takes off his belt and dress shirt and hangs them over the only chair. He stretches out on the bed in his undershirt and trousers, his back against the wall, and I lean against him, feeling his body curve around mine. His warm breath is on my neck, his arm on my waist. I wonder for a moment if he’ll kiss me. I want him to.

“How can this be?” he murmurs. “It isn’t possible. And yet I’ve dreamed of it. Have you?”

I don’t know what to say. I never dared to imagine that I’d see him again. In my experience, when you lose somebody you care about, they stay gone.

“What’s the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?” I ask.

“Seeing you again.”

Smiling, I push back against his chest. “Besides that.”

“Meeting you the first time.”

We both laugh. “Besides that.”

“Hmm, besides that,” he muses, his lips on my shoulder. “Is there anything besides that?” He pulls me close, his hand cupping my hip bone. And though I’ve never done anything like this before—have barely ever been alone with a man, certainly not a man in his undershirt—I’m not nervous. When he kisses me, my whole body hums.

A few minutes later, he says, “I guess the best thing was finding out that I was good at something—at playing the piano. I was such a shell of a person. I had no confidence. Playing the piano gave me a place in the world. And . . . it was something I could do when I was angry or upset, or even happy. It was a way to express my feelings when I didn’t even know what they were.” He laughs a little. “Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“What about you? What’s your best thing?”

I don’t know why I asked him this question, since I don’t have an answer myself. I slide up so I am sitting at the head of the narrow bed with my feet tucked under me. As Dutchy rearranges himself with his back against the wall on the other end, words tumble from my mouth. I tell him about my loneliness and hunger at the Byrnes’, the abject misery of the Grotes’. I tell him about how grateful I am to the Nielsens, and also how tamped down I sometimes feel with them.

Dutchy tells me what happened to him after he left the Grange Hall. Life with the farmer and his wife was as bad as he’d feared. They made him sleep on hay bales in the barn and beat him if he complained. His ribs were fractured in a haying accident and they never called a doctor. He lived with them for three months, finally running away when the farmer woke him with a beating one morning because a raccoon got into the chicken coop. In pain, half starved, with a tapeworm and an eye infection, he collapsed on the road to town and was taken to the infirmary by a kindly widow.

But the farmer convinced the authorities that Dutchy was a juvenile delinquent who needed a firm hand, and Dutchy was returned to him. He ran away twice more—the second time in a blizzard, when it was a miracle he didn’t freeze to death. Running into a neighbor’s clothesline saved his life. The neighbor found him in his barn the following morning and made a deal with the farmer to trade Dutchy for a pig.

“A pig?” I say.

“I’m sure he thought it a worthy trade. That pig was massive.”

This farmer, a widower named Karl Maynard whose son and daughter were grown, gave him chores to do, but also sent him to school. And when Dutchy showed an interest in the dusty upright piano the widower’s wife used to play, he got it tuned and found a teacher to come to the farm to give him lessons.

When he was eighteen, Dutchy moved to Minneapolis, where he took any work he could find playing piano in bands and bars. “Maynard wanted me to take over the farm, but I knew I wasn’t cut out for it,” he says. “Honestly, I was grateful to have a skill I could use. And to live on my own. It’s a relief to be an adult.”

I hadn’t thought about it like this, but he’s right—it is a relief.

He reaches over and touches my necklace. “You still have it. That gives me faith.”

“Faith in what?”

“God, I suppose. No, I don’t know. Survival.”

As light begins to seep through the darkness outside the window, around 5:00 A.M., he tells me that he’s playing the organ in the Episcopal Church on Banner Street at the eight o’clock service.

“Do you want to stay till then?” I ask.

“Do you want me to?”

“What do you think?”

He stretches out beside the wall and pulls me toward him, curving his body around mine again, his arm tucked under my waist. As I lie there, matching my breathing to his, I can tell the moment when he lapses into sleep. I inhale the musk of his aftershave, a whiff of hair oil. I reach for his hand and grasp his long fingers and lace them through mine, thinking about the fateful steps that led me to him. If I hadn’t come on this trip. If I’d had something to eat. If Richard had taken us to a different bar. . . . There are so many ways to play this game. Still, I can’t help but think that everything I’ve been through has led to this. If I hadn’t been chosen by the Byrnes, I wouldn’t have ended up with the Grotes and met Miss Larsen. If Miss Larsen hadn’t brought me to Mrs. Murphy, I never would’ve met the Nielsens. And if I weren’t living with the Nielsens and attending college with Lil and Em, I would never have come to Minneapolis for the night—and probably never would have seen Dutchy again.

My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate.

“SO?” LIL DEMANDS. “WHAT HAPPENED?”

We’re on our way back to Hemingford, with Em stretched out and groaning on the backseat, wearing dark glasses. Her face has a greenish tint.

I am determined not to give anything away. “Nothing happened. What happened with you?”

“Don’t change the subject, missy,” Lil says. “How’d you know that guy, anyway?”

I’ve already thought about an answer. “He’s come into the store a few times.”

Lil is skeptical. “What would he be doing in Hemingford?”

“He sells pianos.”

“Humph,” she says, clearly unconvinced. “Well, you two seemed to hit it off.”

I shrug. “He’s nice enough.”

“How much money do piano players make, anyway?” Em says from the back.

I want to tell her to shut up. Instead I take a deep breath and say, breezily, “Who knows? It’s not like I’m going to marry him or anything.”

Ten months later, after recounting this exchange to two dozen wedding guests in the basement of Grace Lutheran Church, Lil raises her glass in a toast. “To Vivian and Luke Maynard,” she says. “May they always make beautiful music together.”

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1940–1943

In front of other people I call him Luke, but he’ll always be Dutchy to me. He calls me Viv—it sounds a bit like Niamh, he says.

We decide that we’ll live in Hemingford so I can run the store. We’ll rent a small bungalow on a side street several blocks from the Nielsens, four rooms downstairs and one up. As it happens—with, perhaps, a little help from Mr. Nielsen, who may have mentioned something to the superintendent at a Rotary meeting—the Hemingford School is looking for a music teacher. Dutchy also keeps his weekend gig at the Grand in Minneapolis, and I go in with him on Friday and Saturday nights to have dinner and hear him play. On Sundays, now, he plays the organ at Grace Lutheran, replacing the lead-footed organist who was persuaded it was time to retire.

When I told Mrs. Nielsen that Dutchy had asked me to marry him, she frowned. “I thought you said you wanted nothing to do with marriage,” she said. “You’re only twenty. What about your degree?”

“What about it?” I said. “It’s a ring on my finger, not a pair of handcuffs.”

“Most men want their wives to stay home.”

When I related this conversation to Dutchy, he laughed. “Of course you’ll get your degree. Those tax laws are complicated!”

Dutchy and I are about as opposite as two people can be. I am practical and circumspect; he is impulsive and direct. I’m accustomed to getting up before the sun rises; he pulls me back to bed. He has no head at all for math, so in addition to keeping the books at the store, I balance our accounts at home and pay our taxes. Before I met him, I could count on one hand the times I’d had a drink; he likes a cocktail every night, says it relaxes him and will relax me, too. He is handy with a hammer and nail from his experience on the farms, but he often leaves projects half finished—storm windows stacked in a corner while snow rages outside, a leaky faucet disemboweled, its parts all over the floor.

“I can’t believe I found you,” he tells me over and over, and I can’t believe it either. It’s as if a piece of my past has come to life, and with it all the feelings I fought to keep down—my grief at losing so much, at having no one to tell, at keeping so much hidden. Dutchy was there. He knows who I was. I don’t have to pretend.

We lie in bed longer than I am used to on Saturday mornings—the store doesn’t open until ten, and there’s nowhere Dutchy has to be. I make coffee in the kitchen and bring two steaming mugs back to bed, and we spend hours together in the soft early light. I am delirious with longing and the fulfillment of that longing, the desire to touch his warm skin, trace the sinew and muscle just under the surface, pulsing with life. I nestle in his arms, in the nooks of his knees, his body bowed around mine, his breath on my neck, fingers tracing my outline. I have never felt like this—slow-witted and languorous, dreamy, absentminded, forgetful, focused only on each moment as it comes.

When Dutchy lived on the streets, he never felt as alone, he tells me, as he did growing up in Minnesota. In New York the boys were always playing practical jokes on each other and pooling their food and clothes. He misses the press of people, the noise and chaos, black Model Ts rattling along the cobblestones, the treacly smell of street vendors’ peanuts roasting in sugar.

“What about you—do you ever wish you could go back?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Our life was so hard. I don’t have many happy memories of that place.”

He pulls me close, runs his fingers along the soft white underbelly of my forearm. “Were your parents ever happy, do you think?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Pushing the hair back from my face and tracing the line of my jaw with his finger, he says, “With you I’d be happy anywhere.”

Though it’s just the kind of thing he says, I believe that it’s true. And I know, with the newfound clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstance.

ON A MILD AFTERNOON IN EARLY DECEMBER I AM AT THE STORE going over inventory orders with Margaret, the sharp-eyed accounts manager. Packing receipts and forms are all over the floor; I’m trying to decide whether to order more ladies’ trousers than last year, and looking at the popular styles in the catalog as well as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The radio is on low; swing music is playing, and then Margaret holds her hand up and says, “Wait. Did you hear that?” She hurries over to the radio and adjusts the dial.

“Repeat: this is a special report. President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. The attack of the Japanese has also been made on all naval and military ‘activities’ on the island of Oahu. Casualty numbers are unknown.”

And like that, everything changes.

A few weeks later, Lil comes into the store to see me, her eyes red-rimmed, tears staining her cheeks. “Richard shipped out yesterday, and I don’t even know where he’s going. They just gave him a numbered mailing address that doesn’t tell me anything.” Sobbing into a crumpled white handkerchief, she says, “I thought this stupid war was supposed to be over by now. Why does my fiancé have to go?” When I hug her, she clings to my shoulder.

Wherever you look are posters encouraging sacrifice and support for the war effort. Many items are rationed—meat, cheese, butter, lard, coffee, sugar, silk, nylon, shoes; our entire way of business changes as we work with those flimsy blue booklets. We learn to make change for ration stamps, giving red point tokens as change for red stamps (for meat and butter) and blue point tokens for blue stamps (processed foods). The tokens are made of compressed wood fiber, the size of dimes.

In the store we collect ladies’ lightly used stockings for use in parachutes and ropes, and tin and steel for scrap and metal drives. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” is constantly on the radio. I shift our purchasing to reflect the mood, ordering gift cards and blue onionskin airmail letter forms by the gross, dozens of American flags in all sizes, beef jerky, warm socks, decks of playing cards to go in care packages to ship overseas. Our stock boys shovel driveways and deliver groceries and packages.

Boys from my graduating class are signing up and shipping out, and every week there’s a farewell potluck dinner in a church basement or the lobby of the Roxy or in someone’s home. Judy Smith’s boyfriend, Douglas, is one of the first. The day he turns eighteen he goes down to the recuiter’s office and presents himself for service. Hotheaded Tom Price is next. When I run into him on the street before he leaves, he tells me that there’s no downside—the war’s an open door to travel and adventure, with a good bunch of guys to mess around with and a salary. We don’t talk about the danger—but what I imagine is a cartoon version, bullets flying and each boy a superhero, running, invincible, through a spray of gunfire.

Fully a quarter of the boys from my class volunteer. And when the draft begins, more and more pack up to leave. I feel sorry for the boys with flat feet or severe asthma or partial deafness who I see in the store after their buddies are gone, aimlessly wandering the aisles. They seem lost in their ordinary civilian clothes.

But Dutchy doesn’t join the bandwagon. “Let them come for me,” he says. I don’t want to believe he’ll get called up—after all, Dutchy is a teacher; he’s needed in the classroom. But soon enough it becomes clear that it’s only a matter of time.

THE DAY DUTCHY LEAVES FOR FORT SNELLING IN HENNEPIN County for basic training, I take the claddagh off the chain around my neck and wrap it in a piece of felt. Tucking it in his breast pocket, I tell him, “Now a part of me will be with you.”

“I’ll guard it with my life,” he says.

The letters we exchange are filled with hope and longing and a vague sense of the importance of the mission of the American troops. And the milestones of his training: Dutchy passes his physical and scores high on the mechanical aptitude test. Based on these results he’s inducted into the navy to help replace those lost at Pearl Harbor. Soon enough, he’s on a train to San Diego for technical training.

And when, six weeks after he leaves, I write to tell him that I’m pregnant, Dutchy says that he is over the moon. “The thought of my child growing inside you will keep me going through the roughest days,” he writes. “Just knowing that finally I have a family waiting for me makes me more determined than ever to do my duty and find my way home.”

I am tired all the time and sick to my stomach. I’d like to stay in bed, but I know it’s better to stay busy. Mrs. Nielsen suggests that I move back in with them. She says they’ll take care of me and feed me; they’re worried that I’m getting too thin. But I prefer to be on my own. I’m twenty-two years old now, and I’ve gotten used to living like an adult.

As the weeks pass I am busier than ever, working long days in the store and volunteering in the evenings, running the metal drives and organizing shipments for the Red Cross. But behind everything I do is a low hum of fear. Where is he now, what is he doing?

In the letters I write to Dutchy I try not to dwell on my sickness, the constant queasy feeling that the doctor tells me means the baby is thriving inside me. I tell him instead about the quilt I’m making for the baby, how I cut the pattern out of newspaper and then fine sandpaper, which sticks to the material. I chose a pattern with a woven look at the corners that resembles the weaving of a basket, five strips of fabric around the border. It’s cheerful—yellow and blue and peach and pink calico, with off-white triangles in the middle of each square. The women in Mrs. Murphy’s quilting group—of which I am the youngest member and honorary daughter; they’ve cheered my every milestone—are taking extra care with it, hand sewing in precise small stitches a pattern on top of the design.

Dutchy completes his technical training and aircraft carrier flight deck training, and after he’s been in San Diego for a month, he learns that soon he’ll be shipping out. Given his training and the desperate situation with the Japanese, he figures he’ll be heading to the Central Pacific to assist Allied forces in that region, but nobody knows for sure.

Surprise, skill, and power—this, the navy tells its sailors, is what it will take to win the war.

The Central Pacific. Burma. China. These are only names on a globe. I take one of the world maps we sell in the store, rolled tightly and stored in a vertical container, and spread it on the counter. My finger skims the cities of Yangon, near the coast, and Mandalay, the darker mountainous region farther north. I was prepared for Europe, even its far reaches, Russia or Siberia—but the Central Pacific? It’s so far away—on the other side of the world—that I have a hard time imagining it. I go to the library and stack books on a table: geographical studies, histories of the Far East, travelers’ journals. I learn that Burma is the largest country in Southeast Asia, that it borders India and China and Siam. It’s in the monsoon region; annual rainfall in the coastal areas is about two hundred inches, and the average temperature of those areas is close to ninety degrees. A third of its perimeter is coastline. The writer George Orwell published a novel, Burmese Days, and several essays about life there. What I get from reading them is that Burma is about as far from Minnesota as it’s possible to be.

Over the next few weeks, as one day grinds into the next, life is quiet and tense. I listen to the radio, scour the Tribune, wait anxiously for the mail drop, and devour Dutchy’s letters when they come, scanning quickly for news—is he okay? Eating well, healthy?—and parsing every word for tone and nuance, as if his sentences are a code I can crack. I hold each blue-tinted, tissue-thin letter to my nose and inhale. He, too, held this paper. I run my finger over the words. He formed each one.

Dutchy and his shipmates are waiting for orders. Last-minute flight-deck drills in the dark, the preparations of sea bags, every corner filled and every piece in place, from rations to ammunition. It’s hot in San Diego, but they’re warned that where they’re going will be worse, almost unbearable. “I’ll never get used to the heat,” he writes. “I miss the cool evenings, walking along the street holding your hand. I even miss the damn snow. Never thought I’d say that.” But most of all, he says, he misses me. My red hair in the sun. The freckles on my nose. My hazel eyes. The child growing in my stomach. “You must be getting big,” he says. “I can only imagine the sight.”

Now they’re on the aircraft carrier in Virginia. This is the last note he’ll send before they embark; he’s giving it to a chaplain who came on board to see them off. “The flight deck is 862 feet long,” he writes. “We wear seven different colors, to designate our jobs. As a maintenance technician, my deck jersey, float coat, and helmet are an ugly green, the color of overcooked peas.” I picture him standing on that floating runway, his lovely blond hair hidden under a drab helmet.

Over the next three months I receive several dozen letters, weeks after he writes them, sometimes two in the same day, depending on where they were mailed from. Dutchy tells me about the tedium of life on board—how his best friend from their basic training days, another Minnesotan named Jim Daly, has taught him to play poker, and they spend long hours belowdecks with a revolving cast of servicemen in an endless ongoing game. He talks about his work, how important it is to follow protocol and how heavy and uncomfortable his helmet is, how he’s beginning to get used to the roar of the plane engines as they take off and land. He talks about being seasick, and the heat. He doesn’t mention combat or planes being shot down. I don’t know if he isn’t allowed to or if he doesn’t want to frighten me.

“I love you,” he writes again and again. “I can’t bear to live without you. I’m counting the minutes until I see you.”

The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less clichéd. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.