“I’m done!” Kitty said. But she wasn’t. She wanted to know how she looked from behind. She wanted to see how her skirt would move should they go dancing. She wanted to blow into her hands and check that her breath was minty, she wanted even to sniff under her arms to make sure she was “dainty,” as the ads in the women’s magazines suggested she should be. But she couldn’t do all that in front of Tish. She didn’t want either of her sisters to know how excited she was. Hank Cunningham III. A high little sound escaped her, and she turned it into a throat clearing.
“Nervous?” Tish asked, tauntingly.
“Of course not. Now, let’s go.” She started out of the bathroom.
“Kitty?” Tish said, pointing.
Her new purse. A balloon bag of black wool with a tortoiseshell fastener. Forgotten at the side of the sink. Kitty grabbed it and went downstairs for her coat.
“Invite the boy to dinner,” Margaret called, as the girls were on the way out. “I’m making lamb pie with potato crust topping and a lemon sponge cake.” Kitty pretended not to hear and went out to the porch, but Tish called back, “We will!”
Kitty stopped in her tracks. “Tish!”
“What?”
She stood there, thinking. Finally, she said, “Nothing. Hurry up or we’ll miss the streetcar.”
“You’re the one who’s dawdling!”
“THAT’S HIM,” KITTY SAID, POINTING TO THE TALL, dark-haired man coming toward them. Golly, he was a handsome man, more so than she’d remembered. And he was staring directly at Kitty as though…well, as though she were his wife or something! Kitty didn’t know where to look. She glanced at Hank, then away, back at Hank, then away. Her throat was tight; she doubted she could speak. But she had to speak! She had to introduce her sisters, and she had to think of things to say to keep the conversation rolling along. Although Tish was with them; she’d talk all the time, mostly about herself. And Louise was wonderful at drawing people out. Kitty wouldn’t have to worry about talking much at first. But later, when she and Hank were alone, she’d have to guide the conversation. She’d have to keep things cheerful and light. She wanted him to think she was attractive—what fun it had been dressing up for a man she knew rather than for whatever random soldier she might dance with at the Kelly Club! But she’d have to be careful not to be too attractive to him, especially after she’d made such an effort to establish that they were just friends. She wouldn’t be able to linger too long looking into his eyes. She shouldn’t admire his strong profile. She’d have to be careful not to brush hands when they were walking or to dance too close. If they went dancing. If they were together that long. Who knew, his plans might have changed, soldiers’ schedules were always changing, women would travel for days on overcrowded trains, sitting on suitcases in the aisles, just to meet their husbands for a few hours before they shipped out, only to find on arrival that they were already gone. Hank might just say hello and then say he was scheduled to depart on another train that was leaving in an hour. It would be a relief, actually. She and her sisters would have coffee with Hank, wish him the best, and then they could go shopping and to a matinee.
He was only a few feet away. Her heart beat so hard inside her. Her sisters were smiling, but Kitty felt paralyzed, her hands in fists she couldn’t unclench. And now here he was before her, giving her a chaste little hug—oh, he smelled wonderful! Some spicy man’s scent, and he was freshly shaven, how had he done that?
“Hello, Kitty,” he said, and she said nothing for fear she would begin to cry. That was what she felt most overwhelmingly, the need to cry. But it was all right that she didn’t speak, because Hank turned immediately to her sisters to introduce himself. And they were charmed on the spot, she could tell, even as she had been. There was just something about him.
She stood watching him, thinking that there were things she had to remember. She mustn’t take Hank’s arm, because a serviceman needed both arms free: one to salute any superior, one to smoke. But when he said, “How about we all of us take a tour of the town and then have lunch at the best place you know?” she took his arm immediately. And stood too close to him. And wished that by the end of the night she would have kissed him a thousand times.
“WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?” Hank asked Kitty.
Alone since after lunch, they were now sitting in the Black Hawk restaurant at the Congress Hotel, listening to the band play “G.I. Jive.” It was late; Kitty was afraid to ask what the time was. She had had too much to drink—she’d wanted to try a martini with a twist, she liked the sound of it, but it had been much too strong for her. She was dizzy, but in a not entirely unpleasant way. Hank had told her all about how he’d learned to fly, how he’d been put in a simulated cockpit that spun rapidly about so he could practice defensive twists, turns, and dives. He had told her some of the things he’d learned about infantrymen, Kitty having told him that Julian and Michael were in the infantry. He said a lot of the men had pets: dogs, kittens, a Himalayan bear; he said one outfit in the Philippines had even adopted a little baby girl, but she’d been taken away from them after a month. He said that the infantry were the ones who were really fighting the war, that they had it the hardest. He told her about how their lives went from crushing boredom to bloody chaos, how when they fought it was sometimes for days at a time. They went without sleep, often with nothing more to eat than emergency K rations, which Hank described as really just big candy bars full of vitamins.
Kitty had tried to imagine herself doing that: staying awake for days on end, going without bathing for a month, wearing the same socks for weeks, pressing her face down into the dirt of a foxhole while bullets whizzed by overhead, or even more frightening, moving ever forward right into those bullets. It didn’t seem possible that she could be sitting here in her pretty dress at a nice table with a white tablecloth while Julian was on the other side of the world, living in the way that Hank had described.
She stared down into her glass. Cleared her throat.
Hank spoke gently. “I’ve made you sad. I’m sorry.”
“No, I wanted to know.” She shrugged. “Gosh. The whole thing just seems so crazy.”
“It is.”
“But what else do you do when someone like Hitler comes along?”
“Well,” Hank said. “That’s a whole other discussion.”
“You don’t really believe in fighting. You were a conscientious objector.”
“Right.”
“When we first met, you told me you’d explain in a letter why you changed your mind and enlisted. But you never did.”
“I didn’t, did I?”
He stared at her intently, and she felt again the kind of thrill she’d been feeling all night, every time he looked directly at her. He lit a cigarette, and she admired his long lashes, his strong hands. He was so handsome. But there was something else about him. A kindness, and a guilelessness—she felt confident that he would never lie to her or anyone else about anything. And he so enjoyed her! He appreciated her observations, her questions, her jokes. And she knew he thought she was beautiful. She knew that.
Hank’s face changed. He put out his cigarette and sat back in his chair. “Okay, I’ll tell you why I enlisted. You know the guy I took care of in the hospital, the one who made me change my mind?”
Kitty nodded.
“That was my kid brother. Nineteen years old. He was injured in the Philippines, terrible burns. It was a wonder he survived at all, but he did, he survived and he came home and he was doing all right. He never complained, and I know the pain he suffered during his dressing changes was ungodly. He kept his spirits up, too; he knew he was going to look like…Well. he wasn’t going to look like himself anymore. But he would joke about it, say he was going to wear a photo around his neck with a message: ‘This is the real me.’
“We talked a lot about the war; he very much believed in it. He didn’t see any other way to respond to Hitler’s madness, and he felt his sacrifice was worth it. But then he ended up with an overwhelmin
g infection, and he died. I was with him. I had seen people die, working in a hospital, but this was…” Hank shook his head. “This was different. And at that moment the war became very personal for me, and I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore. I couldn’t kill anyone, but I could help others do it for me. My enlisting was a cowardly thing, in that respect. But that’s why I’m flying. My brother made the ultimate sacrifice, and I’m now making my own, for him.” He shrugged, looked out at the dance floor, and said, “Aw, nuts. What do you say we dance? Let’s just dance.”
He took her hand, and they moved out to the dance floor. The band was playing a ballad. Hank pulled her to him, and Kitty closed her eyes and very gently put her lips to his neck and kept them there. He held her even closer. He didn’t smell of cologne anymore. He smelled of his own sweet flesh, and Kitty felt an overwhelming urge to bite him. She giggled.
“What?” he said, and she said, “Nothing,” and giggled again.
When the song ended, Kitty excused herself and went to the powder room. There, she sat in front of the mirror trying to sort out her feelings. How could she be so exhilarated? So full of desire? So sad and so happy? It was all mixed up! You heard such terrible things, and they made you want to grab on to everything beautiful and hold it that much harder, maybe that was it. Or maybe it had finally happened to her, the things she’d heard other girls talk about. She thought of Hank sitting at the table waiting for her return, and it was all she could do not to run back out and fling her arms around him. She wanted him in a way she’d never experienced want before. It wasn’t physical attraction, though that was there, too. It was more a feeling that she had met her man. That one. The only one.
Oh, how could she be thinking such things when she’d learned so much about all that Julian was enduring? Was this what the Dear John girls went through, coming to the sad conclusion that they weren’t in love with their fighting men after all, that in fact they were wildly in love with someone else? Hattie had told her about one woman who had written to a sailor, saying she was sorry but she’d met another “very nice” man. I hope we can still be friends, she’d told him, and had followed that deadly statement with something even worse—in a P.S., she’d asked for the photos she’d sent of herself to be returned. In a P.S.! Hattie had been aghast at the cruelty. But now here Kitty was, out on a date with another man and feeling head over heels about him. She had thought she loved Julian, but now she knew different. She had been attracted to Julian, but the two of them had never run deep, ever. Look at the difficulty she’d had writing to him. They couldn’t talk to each other! What kind of a relationship could two people have when they couldn’t really talk to each other?
“You going to sit there all night?” a woman standing behind her asked.
“Oh!” Kitty got up from the little white stool. “I’m sorry.”
The woman, dressed in a long midnight-blue evening dress, sat down and began brushing her hair. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beat!”
Kitty nodded. “Me, too.” But she wasn’t tired anymore.
She returned to the table and stared into her lap, nearly overwhelmed by her feelings. She wanted to grab Hank by the shoulders and tell him, but tell him what? He reached over to put his finger beneath her chin and gently turned her face to his. “My God, you are so lovely,” he said. She didn’t speak. Didn’t move. “May I kiss you? Please?” And he put his lips so gently, so briefly, to hers. She began to cry then, and expected that Hank would ask her what was wrong. But he didn’t. He said, “I know.” And then he kissed her again and told her he was so glad, he felt the same way, they would work it all out, don’t worry, everything would work out fine. He took her out onto the dance floor, and they moved slowly as the dark-haired singer in the white dress sang “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Together, she and Hank sang along: “‘I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.’”
They left the club with their arms around each other, and their steps matched in stride and purpose. They rode the streetcar, and she kept her head on his shoulder, and she wanted to tell everyone who looked at them, “You think you know what I’m feeling, but it’s so much more than that.” When she kissed Hank for the last time, in the darkest shadows on her front porch, she began again to cry. “Don’t,” he said. “We have so much to be happy about.”
“Please be careful,” she said, and it came to her how different it felt saying it to him rather than to Julian. She had wanted Julian to be careful, too, of course, but her love for him was not like this. It never was. “Come back to me,” she told Hank, and he pulled her to him and whispered in her ear, “Where else would I ever go now?”
Kitty let herself in the door quietly, fearful that one or both of her parents would be waiting up for her, but the house was still. She sat in her father’s chair, thinking, and then she crept up the stairs to bed.
“OH, KITTY, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?” Louise said. “You hadn’t been with a man for so long, Hank is handsome and he’s charming, but Kitty, he’s not Julian, or—”
“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Kitty said. It was Sunday afternoon, and the sisters were up in their bedroom, talking in low voices. Because Tish had gone out with friends, Kitty and Louise had some semblance of privacy, though of course the house rang with the sounds of the rest of the family. “Something really important happened.”
“I’ll bet you were drunk, were you drunk?” Louise asked.
“No. I had a drink, but I wasn’t drunk.”
“Well, if you weren’t drunk, you were affected. You drink about as well as Pop.”
Kitty pounded the bed with her fist. “It wasn’t that!”
Louise stared at her. “Jeez. You need some sleep. Why don’t you take a nap?”
“Louise, I just want you to understand. I just want to talk to you about this!”
“I’m sorry,” Louise said. “But I don’t believe it was love. I think you had a nice evening with a nice guy and you just turned it all into some fantasy. You don’t have a relationship after one night! You don’t plan a future with a guy you’ve seen twice! Cripes, Kitty, don’t you think you need to spend some time with a person before you can say you know him? Anybody can act like a dreamboat for a few hours!”
“Julian doesn’t really care for me,” Kitty said.
Louise sighed. “I’m not talking about Julian.”
Kitty bit back the words she was about to say next. Instead, she said, “So…you don’t think he really cares for me, either.”
Louise looked into her sister’s face and spoke gently. “I think Julian has been distant. I think he’s changed. And…Well. I’ll just tell you. I always did think that there was something off with the two of you. You weren’t ever really serious with each other, either of you. It was like you decided to call what you had love, but it was more of a…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it was.”
“So why are you so resistant to the idea that I’ve found love with Hank?”
“Because I don’t think that’s love, either!” Louise said. “That’s just a night on the town with a handsome fellow who’s lonely and a pretty girl who’s just as lonely as he is! Why do you think they don’t let you give your address at the USO clubs? Because of these wartime infatuations that people call love! And then they get themselves in all kinds of trouble!”
Kitty went to the dresser and began roughly brushing her hair. She was exhausted. She wanted to cry. But mostly she was angry. She could hardly keep from saying to Louise, “You should know about getting in trouble, all right!” She brushed her hair harder.
Louise came and took the brush from her hand. Then she began gently brushing her sister’s hair. Kitty stood still and let her. Louise would come around. She would.
“LAST NIGHT I DREAMED MY MOM was alive again, and she’d come over here with all her pots and pans in a big trunk. She showed them to me and said she was going to cook me a big steak dinner, but that I shouldn’t tell the other boys, becaus
e she didn’t have enough for all of them.”
“Ho,” Tish said. “Michael would never do that.”
Louise laughed. “You’re right! Listen.
“Well, I couldn’t do that, of course, so I told her, Oh, just make hamburgers for all of us.”
Louise was reading from Michael’s latest letter. He was back in England, training again for the ever-coming European invasion, and Louise was happy that he was, for the time being anyway, not under direct fire.
The sisters sat in their warm robes around the kitchen table while outside the snow fell furiously. Binks had said it was going to reach the roof, and Kitty was beginning to think he was right. But soon it would be March, and then they would be one month closer to spring.
“You said you wondered if Hitler’s soldiers really believed in him,” Louise read. “Well, this story might help you. There was a German soldier who tried to surrender when we were in North Africa. His own men shot him. And then one of them shouted, ‘Now you know Hitler.’”
“I know another story,” Tish said. “This guy met a German girl who had escaped the country, she and her family? She said in her school they showed a film of Nazi soldiers going into enemy territory. It was dark, and they were marching alongside deep water. One of them fell in, and with all that heavy equipment he was carrying, he couldn’t get out. He didn’t want to endanger the other soldiers by calling for help, so he put his face in the water and quietly drowned himself.”
“They’re monsters,” Louise said. She put her hand to her belly, still relatively small, even though she was now seven months pregnant. Louise looked wonderful, even in her shapeless, faded, and mostly threadbare maternity clothes. The tentlike tops and elastic-paneled skirts had been donated from here, there, and everywhere. “No point in buying them new,” their mother had said, but Kitty couldn’t stand it and had bought a navy blue top for her sister with a crisp white bow, and Louise had wept, thanking her. “Gosh, I’m so emotional all the time!” she’d said. And indeed she was; she cried easily, and she laughed easily, too—the silliest joke from one of her brothers would have her howling, much to their delight, of course.
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