A Man of His Own

by Susan Wilson

  Chapter Eight

  It wasn’t like Pearl Harbor happened and then Rick left. We had a couple of months of what I thought of as a grace period while the military got around to calling him up, and then he had a date for his induction, which gave us four more weeks before he’d depart for Fort Dix. We had time, but we wasted a lot of it anticipating the final moments. We played out the scene in our minds so often that when it finally happened, it was with an extraordinary sense of déjà vu. We should have spent the grace period walking Pax along the Charles, eating in restaurants we couldn’t afford, laughing at mindless radio programs, and dancing at the Totem Pole. But instead, we clung to each other and made promises we couldn’t hope to live up to. He promised to come back and pick up where we’d left off. I promised not to worry about him. We debated the wisdom of trying now for a baby. Rick even suggested that we sit down with a pad of paper with a line drawn down the center, heading the left column “Pro” and the right one “Con.” As if he thought we were analyzing the concept of moving to a new house or buying a new car. I knew already what the biggest pro was—giving Rick something to hope for—and the biggest con—my becoming a widow with a small child.

  “Maybe the fact that we haven’t conceived is God’s way of—”

  “Oh, Rick, please don’t say that it’s God’s plan.”

  “Okay. Maybe fate has intervened.”

  I blushed with the secret I had been holding so close to my heart, waiting until I was absolutely certain before getting Rick’s hopes up. I was late. For the first time ever. We were inveterate calendar watchers now, and I counted four days. Four days of growing significance. And in six, he would leave.

  In my mind, the real question was whether to get his hopes up and dash them in a letter, or surprise him in a letter by saying that our hopes had finally been fulfilled. One more day, I thought. I’ll tell him in one more day. And then another just to be sure. A whisper in his ear the morning he leaves. I couldn’t wait to see the beaming grin on his face.

  Without jealousy, I let Rick go out alone with Pax on their evening constitutionals. Where I had always enjoyed the walk, now I understood on some level that these two buddies, man and dog, needed a little female-free time. Rick somehow had to explain to Pax that this wasn’t a road trip, that this was something entirely different. This time, there might be months or even, God forbid, years before they’d be together again. I wept a little thinking how impossible it was to explain to a dog that you weren’t abandoning him, that you hadn’t forgotten him, that you were just the unwilling pawn in circumstances out of your control.

  * * *

  South Station. There was an icy breeze slicing across the tracks, so we went inside to wait. No one looking at the stiff-jawed man and the puffy-eyed woman said anything about the presence of the dog. In our obsessive playing out of this scene, we’d forgotten that the place would be crowded with other servicemen and their families. Somehow I think that we both saw this farewell taking place in a cocoon of privacy. Instead, the defiant smiles and unattended children running around shrieking so that the place echoed with their voices, didn’t fade into the background like in some movie, but stood out as proof that what Rick was doing, and what I was enduring, was universal and unavoidable. We were not alone.

  As if he understood that this wasn’t an ordinary departure, Pax pressed himself up close to Rick, leaving silver dog hairs on his charcoal gray dress pants. We laughed, that awful strained laughter of people on the verge of tears. I brushed the hairs off Rick’s leg, but they slipped off my glove and drifted back.

  “Leave them.” Rick held my hand, and I realized that he would spend the train ride picking those hairs off. I knew that he superstitiously put a few of Pax’s hairs in his baseball cap for luck; maybe he’d do the same with these loose hairs clinging to his pant leg, collecting them, maybe even dropping a few in his wallet to remind him of this other family member he was leaving behind.

  Waiting was interminable and, conversely, the departure was all too soon. When you have said all that you can say, the silence enfolds you and you cast about, searching for that last important reminder or anecdote, until there is only empty space in your head and your heart is screaming for relief. And then the whistle blows and suddenly all these men scurry away, last kisses and hugs, last admonitions to be careful. Last I love yous.

  Rick knelt on the platform and put his arms around Pax. I don’t know what he said to him, but the dog licked his face, something he rarely did, and watched intently as Rick handed me the leash, as if the dog knew that there was a changing of the guard, that I was now the person in charge.

  Then Rick took me in his arms in a way that he would never do again in quite the same way. He kissed me with a passion that I would never quite know again.

  We didn’t say anything else. No unnecessary reminders to write, no useless pleas to stay safe. The last thing Rick said to me was, “Don’t stay. Don’t stand out here in the cold and wave when I won’t be able to see you. Take Pax for a walk. I want to think of you and him playing on the Common as if it’s an ordinary day. Not here.”

  By now, the mass of enlisted men was funneling itself into the train; faces appeared at the windows as men jockeyed for position. Windows opened; heads and arms stuck out. I was nearly knocked down by the seemingly unending number of families that rushed the platform. Wives and children, mothers and sisters, little brothers looking jealous, fathers discretely touching eyes with handkerchiefs and maybe remembering their own departures twenty-some years before, leaving for another war. Everyone wanting a last look, a last word.

  In the end, I didn’t say anything. That morning, I had awakened with the thick rumblings of an impending period. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe this meant that Rick would come home to me, and our children would come easily after that. But it still felt like I’d said two good-byes—one to my husband and the other to the last chance we’d have to have a baby.

  Pax rumbled in his throat, not a growl, but a warning to anyone pushing too close. I had to get him out of there. Rick was right. There was no way he’d catch sight of me surrounded as I was by taller, wider people all vying for that last look. I tried to fight my way out, but my “Excuse me” and “Pardon me” went unheard by a crowd aware only of its own farewells.

  Suddenly, Pax barked, loud and full of warning. The masses parted, startled by the deep voice of the dog. Like Moses parting the Red Sea. I couldn’t wait to tell Rick how his dog had taken charge of the situation. And with that random thought, the magnitude of what was happening washed over me. Rick was being sucked into the vortex of this new American reality of war. I wouldn’t tell him this anecdote, but write it in the first of the thousand letters that I would pen for the duration. I shook back the wash of dread and told myself that I would write to him that night and tell him about how Pax had moved aside the crowd. I would tell him that we’d played on the Common and that we’d had leftover meat loaf for dinner. I wouldn’t write down on that scrap of paper that Pax had had to guide me out of South Station because I was blinded by tears, doubly grieving Rick’s departure and the thickly flowing evidence of our failure, once again, to conceive.

  Chapter Nine

  It felt wrong, this departure. The tension emanating from his people had put Pax on the alert. Pax understood that Rick was going away; it happened with enough regularity that he no longer worried about it. Rick always came back. And Francesca was good company while they waited for his return. But this time, for a long while before the actual moment of departure, this human pair had been exuding an indefinable vibration. Not grief, or hope, or happiness, or tension, or despair, but some amalgam of all of those. It was hard on his sensitive nerves, trying to sort out what exactly was wrong. Then the three of them went to that noisy, crowded place, and Francesca shuddered all night afterward, despite Pax keeping his eyes on her and his head on her waist, standing all night beside the bed without sleeping while she trembled. She was afraid, and he couldn’t find out w
hat the source of that fear was. He’d left her side only long enough to patrol the apartment, corner to corner, door to door, and nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed threatening.

  There was always a rhythm to Rick’s absences, and Pax could sense which day would be the day he’d be home. Sometimes it was what Francesca cooked. A roast with its meat juices sizzling in the oven meant that Rick would be home. Sometimes it was that she whistled softly as she changed their bed, stripping off the more interesting-smelling sheets and putting on crisp ironed ones that would take a night to acquire the comforting scent of his people’s bodies. A third indicator that their little pack was about to be returned to normal was the scent that Francesca spritzed on herself. Pax couldn’t understand this need to disguise her willingness to mate, but humans did a lot of things that puzzled the dog.

  Even for an animal with no sense of the passing of time, Pax knew that Rick had been gone a long while. No roast in the oven; sheets changed, but no whistling. No perfume clouding Francesca’s proper scent. The slowness with which Francesca moved around the apartment. Drifting. Settling the new black curtains more exactly against the sills. Wandering into the kitchen but making no move to feed herself. More and more, Pax kept to her side, something he never did when Rick was there.

  As she drifts from room to room, Pax follows, his cold black nose an inch from her hand, so that when she sighs and reaches back, she knows that he’s there, ready to take on her worry. Sometimes she presses her cheek against his skull and whispers, but of all the words she says, there is only one word he knows, Rick, spoken over and over. When she does that, Pax closes his eyes, vaguely recalling the feel of his mother’s body covering his and trembling with fear.

  Chapter Ten

  I think that many of us went into this war thinking that it would be over fairly quickly. Or that’s what we told ourselves, because it was inconceivable that our men would be gone for so long. It had been half a year since Rick shipped out, bound for the battlefields of Europe.

  We had a brief reunion when Rick got leave just before shipping out. He couldn’t get back to Boston, so Pax and I piled into our 1936 Plymouth and drove all the way to New Jersey. As we started out, my hands gripped the steering wheel like vises, and I was more than convinced that my inexperience behind the wheel was going to be the death of us. Rick had taught me how to drive in those last few weeks before he left for boot camp, but I rarely took the car out. By the time I reached Fort Dix, I drove with one hand casually on the wheel and the other elbow resting on the open window. I’d become a driver.

  I don’t remember much of that reunion, just that it was a worse good-bye than that at South Station. Then he’d still been in civilian dress; now he stood there, crisp and stiff and unbearably handsome in his khaki uniform, his very scent unfamiliar. We had two days, and I don’t think we saw the outside of our hotel except for taking Pax out. Rick made me leave him instead of him leaving me. I drove off in that Plymouth, Pax with his head hanging out the passenger window, me in danger of a wreck because of the tears. Rick briskly walked away from us in the opposite direction so that I wouldn’t remember him with any other expression but a smile.

  * * *

  With so many of the men gone, the Fore River Shipyard had begun hiring women to fill in the holes in the line. My pal Connie Mills tried to chivy me into going in to see if I could be of use. Connie was married to one of the catchers, a player who hadn’t waited for the Selective Service Act, but joined up the day after Pearl Harbor. “Do it with me. We can wear overalls and not worry about our hair. We can’t keep sitting around; we need to do our bit.”

  “Doing our bit” was the constant refrain. A serviceman was doing his bit; civilians who collected scrap metal and saved bacon grease were doing theirs. We were inculcated with the idea that we were all responsible for the outcome of this conflict and we all felt a personal responsibility. Beyond victory gardens and blackout curtains, the American way was to make every personal decision based on the war. We learned to do without, a lesson learned from our parents, who had survived the Depression and handed down to us their experience to serve a new purpose. We took great pride in drinking our tea without sugar and learning to like margarine. We debated every use of the car and saved our gas-ration coupons like misers. Self was secondary to winning the war and sacrifice was honor.

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Francesca, you’re just moping around here. It isn’t healthy. I know you’re still a honeymooner, but, honey, you need to get out.”

  “I’m not a honeymooner, not anymore.”

  “You’re a honeymooner until you have kids.”

  I know that Connie couldn’t have meant to hurt me, but her words were like little slaps. I had to forgive her, though, because she could have no idea how hard we’d been trying to become parents, and that we weren’t deliberately prolonging our honeymoon.

  We were sitting at my kitchen table, Pax beneath it in what I called “his cave.” Even as I swallowed Connie’s words, I felt the weight of his paw on my foot, reminding me he was there.

  “I have Pax. We have Pax.”

  Connie patted my hand. “Sweetheart, Pax is not a child.”

  But he was to me. He needed me. How could I leave him all day? Fore River was in Quincy, a long train ride from our little apartment in Brighton. Green Line to the Red. It would be highly irresponsible to leave the dog alone for what could be ten hours a day. He’d go mad. “No, I can’t go that far every day.”

  “Then find something closer. Francesca, we all have to do something. Think of it as helping our boys over there with what we’re doing here.”

  She made a good case. Connie was fired up, and I knew that she wouldn’t let me be until I found some war work to do. And, truthfully, I was ready to do something. My little bit of volunteering with the other wives for the local children’s hospital was good, but Connie was right: I needed to be a part of the war effort. Everyone I knew was doing something. Back in Mount Joy, my pal Gertie was taking a nursing course, and Patty was in charge of the blood drives for the whole county. And both of them were now wives and mothers, as Connie suggested; it wasn’t like I had kids at home to take care of to fill my time. Only Pax.

  * * *

  The wire factory had geared up for the war, along with so many other peacetime businesses, and was running three shifts to bend wire into the war machine. Second and third shifts paid best, but I was content with first. After all, we had savings and I had Rick’s army pay, which wasn’t nearly as much as his baseball salary, but enough to support me, so I left the better-paying jobs for those who really needed them. Best of all was that it was within walking distance from home. I could be home in minutes and often went home at lunchtime to let Pax out.

  We were a noisy crew, the bane of the one male floor supervisor, who had to put up with our jokes and gossip and insistence on popular music in the break room. The puke green walls of the break room were plastered in what in another country might have been called “propaganda posters,” but we looked on them as patriotic reminders of our importance in the war effort: BUY WAR BONDS; LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS; DON’T TELL SECRETS ON THE PHONE; DO THE JOB HE LEFT BEHIND; and other variations on the perpetual theme of winning the war and the continued responsibility of every citizen to remain alert and focused on the effort. I found myself studying the images of European peasants huddled against ominous threats and, my favorite, the one of the sinister-looking man sniffing around for secrets.

  The morning Globe was filled mostly with news of the war and the noble work being done on the home front. It cheered me in some way to read of the galvanized spirit of my adopted community and my country in the communal effort to defeat the Axis powers and return the world to sanity.

  Rick had been overseas for almost six months. His letters had begun to thin out, not as if the effort of writing was too much, but because the relentless bounce between periods of insufferable boredom and hours, days, or even weeks of adrenaline-charge
d action was telling on him. How could he continue to write jolly, flirtatious V-mail letters when all around him the world was coming apart at the seams? It’s pretty difficult to keep up a facade of optimism when you are mired in the mud of the battlefield. I’d get them in bundles, six or seven letters herded together from the various places where he’d had the opportunity to post them, and their sameness was blatant as I read them one after another. Eventually, I didn’t even need to sort them in date order; the messages were the same: He missed me. He missed Pax. He was all right. They were hunkered down in fairly comfortable circumstances, or they were on the move. He got to be so careful, there were almost no censor’s marks on his single sheet of V-mail. If he’d gotten my letters, he might reply to a question, or offer advice, or comment on something I’d gossiped about. His letters were mostly out of sync with mine, and I might wait a few weeks before I opened a letter that would answer a question I’d forgotten I’d asked. “I miss you. I miss Pax. I miss spring training. I miss home.” Those were the salient facts; that was his litany. And I wrote back that I missed him, and that Pax was fine and missed him, too. I told him to take heart, stay safe. We’d all be reunited soon, I said.