by Peggy Gaddis
She thought of Bill and all the things he had said. She was not afraid of poverty; she had almost always known it. But now, she realized, in the light of Bill’s arguments, of his impassioned bitterness, what she had known had been more a thrifty frugality, rather than the abject, heartbreaking tragedy of Bill’s youth. He had grown through a bitterness that had left a scar on his mind that might never heal. He would never be able to look lightly on money; its power to provide for those he loved, not only the small luxuries and comforts, but the actual necessities of life, had been made so brutally plain to him. Maybe Bill was wrong—but he was hers!
By the time the train had pulled into Atlanta five hours later, she had managed to convince herself that Bill was right. She had cast her lot with him, and whatever came, she and Bill would belong to each other. And after all, wasn’t that the one thing in life she wanted?
Bill was waiting for her as her taxi halted at the hotel entrance, and the light in his eyes as he hurried forward and helped her out of the taxi sent a warm flood of delight through her.
“Hello, you!” said Bill huskily, his eyes adoring her.
He paid the taxi, took her suitcase, and turned with her to the hotel’s parking lot where the familiar blue sports car stood waiting. He put her into the car, stowed her bag in the trunk with his own, and came swiftly around to get in beside her.
He brought out a square cellophane florist’s box, through which there was the gleam of white orchids, crisp and very pleased with their own beauty.
“I always like my brides to wear orchids,” he told her, beaming at her while, with a mist of happy tears in her eyes, she pinned the orchids to the shoulder of her smart new green suit.
Bill sighed happily and said, “Ready, sweet? All set?”
“All set,” she told him, with a reckless feeling of throwing all doubt and fear behind her.
“Then here we go—all aboard for paradise!” said Bill, and sent the car out of the parking lot and away from town, toward the state border, eighty miles away.
They were married in the first little town across the border, in a state where there was no waiting for a marriage license.
Bill had chosen a small white church, shaded by age-old live oaks. A neat white-painted cottage beside it was the parsonage, and here a thin, tall old man with snowy hair and the gentlest blue eyes Cathy had ever seen read the marriage service for them, in a warm and mellow voice which told them that he never tired of the beautiful old words no matter how often he read them. His plump, motherly wife and a pleasant neighbor woman, who happened to be calling on the minister and his wife, were the witnesses.
Later, as Bill and Cathy were driving north, she said huskily, “Thank you for not making it a justice of the peace and a dingy little office somewhere.”
“Did you think I’d let you in for that, sweet? I knew you’d want a minister and a few of the trimmings,” said Bill, and he kissed her.
Some hours later they stopped for the night at a small, old-fashioned roadside inn. There were trees close around the big, two-storied white frame building, trees whose rustling branches whispered through the wide open windows; and the scent of the countryside, fragrant with spring, came to them. It was, after all, a beautiful wedding, Cathy told herself contentedly. How could she ever have wanted anything different?
Bill had visited New York before, and he took an intense delight in revealing its charms and wonders to his bride. It was a dream honeymoon, and Cathy reveled in it.
The shops, the theaters, the night clubs were fun; she loved the subway, to Bill’s intense, fond amusement. They visited the museums, the planetarium, the zoo, and all the many places that heretofore had been merely intriguing names to Cathy.
They strolled down Broadway one evening when the street was at its most exciting best; just after dark, when the lights were blazing, and the street packed with people strolling as they were. It was too late for the dinner crowd, too early for the theater crowd, and it was possible to stroll.
Suddenly Cathy looked up at an enormous sign and said gaily, “Oh, Roseland. Let’s go and dance, Bill! I’ve heard so much about it—it must be fun!”
“You infant,” said Bill fondly, but offered no objection.
The dance hall was not yet crowded.
They found a table and watched for a while, and then they danced and came back to the table for a drink. Cathy was beaming joyously at Bill, when suddenly four soldiers stopped beside their table and one of them cried out in a tone of incredulous delight:
“Hi, fellas! Whaddaya know? It’s Darling!”
Startled, Cathy looked up into a gaunt face from which the tropical sun-tan was fading.
“You are Darling, aren’t you?” the boy said eagerly. “Of course, you look a whole lot different to what you did that evening when you and Captain Graham stumbled out of the jungle and scared the living daylights out of the whole outpost. You were so ragged and so scratched and bitten-up by the insects that it was a couple of days before we could believe you were human!”
Cathy stared, speechless. She had tucked back into her subconsciousness the terrible memory that his words brought suddenly before her. But the other three boys gathered about her, greeting her with such warm eagerness that for the moment all of them, including Cathy herself, forgot that Bill was there.
“Gee-gosh, Darling—I never believed you could look like this!” said the boy who had spoken first, his eyes taking her in from head to foot with eager admiration.
And then the tall boy, who was obviously the ringleader, noticed Bill and said casually, “Hi.” And added with a disarming grin, “You see, we call her Darling because we don’t know her other name.”
Cathy, remembering Bill tardily, turned to him, but before she could speak Bill said icily, “Her other name is Miss Layne.”
She caught her breath as though he had struck her. She had been about to say, Boys, my husband. He had denied her in front of these boys. And she saw that his eyes were blazing with anger and that his jaw was set and hard. He was angry! He bitterly resented these boys and their exuberant greeting of her. He was, of course, jealous—and that stiffened her spine more than a little.
“And Miss Layne is tired and doesn’t care to dance,” Bill went on curtly, his tone a dismissal so abrupt that it made Cathy’s own eyes flash.
“Nonsense—I’m not tired at all,” she said swiftly, and turned to the tall boy. “Shall I call you Darling, too, because I don’t know your other name?” She laughed.
“Hank Bowers, from Texas. Only why bother with it? I like Darling fine,” said Hank happily, and put his arms about her as the dance began.
She looked over his shoulder and saw the other three boys settle themselves at the table with Bill, all of them watching her and Hank. Bill’s face was grim; the boys were ignoring him, talking among themselves, and Cathy felt as though suddenly she had stepped out of a warmed and lighted room into bitter cold darkness.
She made herself respond to Hank’s eager chatter; she danced with each of the other three boys, while Bill glowered and waited, and while the bitterness and the darkness grew in her heart. And when she finally came back to the table, after dancing with each of the four boys, she smiled uncertainly at Bill and said, “Your turn, Bill?”
“Thanks—I think not, it’s getting late,” said Bill, and there was no arguing his tone.
“How’s the captain, Darling?” asked one of the other boys innocently, with a sly glance at Bill; and Cathy knew that he had recognized Bill’s jealousy and was, in his own language, “needling the guy.”
“He was fine the last time I saw him,” she answered lightly.
“He’s one swell egg, Captain Graham, even if he is an officer,” said Hank gravely.
“The only good-looking guy I ever liked,” contributed another with almost childlike innocence, though Cathy knew he was enjoying Bill’s impotent and mounting rage.
“He’s quite a guy,” said Cathy demurely, knowing that it was wicked of
her to be amused at the very obvious game these boys were playing against Bill. She hated having him made grim and bitter by jealousy—but these poor kids! For all the hellish time they had had, for all the courage and the cool ability with which they had faced it they were still just kids. After all, if Bill couldn’t see a joke—
It was obvious from the way Bill almost thrust her into the taxi that he did not intend to see the joke.
“You must have had yourself quite a time in Vietnam, with practically the entire Army calling you Darling,” he said furiously as the taxi drew away from the curb.
“Bill, darling—” she began.
“Don’t call me darling!” Bill exploded so savagely that the taxi driver slued his head about and eyed him speculatively. Bill forced himself to speak in a more restrained tone. “I think I’ve heard quite enough of that word to last me the rest of my life—if you don’t mind—Darling!”
He flung the word at her in a tone that made it an insulting taunt, and Cathy, embarrassed and aware of the fact that the taxi driver’s ears were almost visibly distended and that every word was quite audible to him, set her teeth hard and rode in silence.
In silence Bill picked up the key at the hotel desk. In silence he bowed her ceremoniously into the elevator, and in silence he unlocked the door of their suite and pushed it open. In silence he followed her into the sitting room, shut the door behind him, and switched on the lights.
She saw his face white and harsh, like the face of a stranger. She sat down, because her knees refused to support her any longer. But anger quickened in her, too, and she spoke curtly.
“Don’t you think you’re being a bit silly about this, Bill?”
“Perhaps,” said Bill softly. “Perhaps—yet I think most any man would be a little—shall we say upset?—to find that the girl he has just married was the talk of Vietnam, after a little escapade in which she and a dashing young pilot went AWOL for a week—or was it ten days?”
Cathy tensed, but she kept her voice determinedly quiet.
“And don’t you imagine that a bride of less than three weeks finds it a little odd that her brand-new husband doesn’t care to be introduced to her friends as her husband?”
“Your friends!” Bill’s voice made the words an insult. “What right had those—those young hoodlums to call you Darling?”
“They are not hoodlums!” Cathy flashed hotly. “They are four fine boys who are doing an ugly, dirty job with distinction. They know none of the nurses by name—how could they? One night among my patients on a flight back to base, I had a boy who’d been quite a lad with the girls back home. I gave him a blood transfusion and prayed with all my heart he’d live. And just when I thought he was gone, he opened his eyes and looked up at me and said very faintly, ‘Hello, Darling—I don’t know your other name.’ ”
She was still for a moment, reliving that scene.
“The others aboard found that so startling that they thought it funny. There was some laughter and—well, from that time on, it became a sort of joke. I was ‘Darling—because I don’t know your other name.’ Just as the other nurses had nicknames the boys had given them, acquired in some such way.”
Bill had listened, but his grim face did not soften.
“Naturally you don’t want to talk about being ‘lost’ with a dashing young airman for days on end in a romantic jungle?” Bill’s jealousy was a dark and ugly thing.
“Romantic?”
The word in that connection was so utterly crazy that she gave a little jerk of laughter and Bill’s eyes flickered. But after a moment she steadied herself and probed deep into her memory. The words came slowly at first, gathering speed and strength as the wash of memory deepened.
She heard her voice, that didn’t seem to be her voice; and the picture her words painted wiped out the luxurious hotel room and took her back to a morning just before dawn; to the base hospital. She saw herself, trim and neat in slacks and zippered jacket, the little cap with her gold insignia tilted above one eye and a rangy young man standing beside a cargo plane, which, once they reached the combat area would be swiftly unloaded and transformed into an ambulance, with desperately wounded men on stretchers, the poles of the stretchers caught in the strongly webbed ropes that dropped from the ceiling. Twenty-six men whose lives would be in her hands.
She drew a hard breath and stopped for a moment, because the words had brought it all back so vividly. How she had climbed sleepily into the plane, curling up on the mail sacks, snatching a few hours’ sleep when and where she could—one of the first lessons a trained nurse learns and doubly valuable to an army nurse—because once the cargo plane became a flying ambulance, there would be no chance for sleep.
She remembered the shocked, dazed feeling with which she had been jerked awake when the pilot had shouted to her that there was an enemy plane approaching. There had been a few frantic moments that had seemed hours long, when the pilot had turned and darted away.
A tense, breathless moment, and then the pilot had spoken savagely.
“Here he comes—and we haven’t even an air rifle. Hit the silk, Darling—hit the silk!”
Cathy had been ready. Almost at the same moment she and the pilot bailed out. There was the familiar violent jerk with which her parachute opened; there was the dreadful waiting to find whether the Vietcong pilot would machine-gun them as they floated downward.
She and the pilot had lain exhausted for a while when they had landed. They were scratched and bruised, but not seriously hurt.
They had folded and destroyed their parachutes, working briskly and competently as each had been trained to do; and then the pilot had stared at her curiously, and had said dryly, “Well—well! So this is what it’s like to be shipwrecked with a gorgeous gal!”
Badly shaken, she had struggled to match his attempt at flippancy.
“It’s not much like the movies, is it?” she had managed to ask.
Even now, her voice dropped to silence before the vividness of the memory her words had conjured up. The steamy jungle; the dim light filtering through the vine-entangled trees; the fear that about them in the jungle might be hidden more of the enemy; the breathless hope that somewhere not too far away there might be a post.
She heard, as from a great distance, Bill’s voice.
“Well, go on—or are you embarrassed?”
Bewildered, she looked up at him.
“Embarrassed?” she repeated.
“What happened?” he asked shortly.
“We made our way out,” she said at last. “Crawling, plodding, creeping—an inch at a time, it seemed. Oh, I can’t tell you what it was like, Bill. You—you couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Of course not,” said Bill, and his voice was a lash tipped with steel. “I’m only a measly 4-F—not one of the gloriously elect of the armed services, who take it as simply routine that a good-looking man and a pretty girl should get themselves lost for eight days and nights in a place like that without romance lifting its head.”
“Romance?” she repeated incredulously.
“Are you trying to tell me that this Graham didn’t make love to you?” Bill put it brutally, so that she flinched as though from a blow.
For a dazed, unbelieving moment she only looked at him. Couldn’t he realize that in those terrible hours she and Graham had ceased to be a man and a woman—male and female—and had just become two tortured human beings dependent on each other for survival?
“Well? Can’t you think up a good answer to that?” asked Bill at last.
Cathy shook her head.
“No, Bill, I’m afraid I can’t,” she told him simply. “The only answer I can think of is this: If you hold me so lightly in your mind that you could believe such a thing of me, then it’s good that ours is a secret marriage and that it can be ended that way—secretly, here and now.”
Bill said sharply, “Oh, come now, Cathy—”
“I mean it, Bill,” she told him, and though her voice was husky
and shaken, there was a determination in it that silenced him. “I felt all along that we were making a mistake to be married like this; if you had introduced me to those boys as your wife, they’d never have mentioned Graham.”
“And I’d have gone on being a fool and knowing nothing about the way you behaved while you were out of the country.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any answer to that, Bill,” she said. “I’m sorry it ended like this. It was fun—for a while.”
She turned, and with all the pride at her command, managed to steady herself so that she could walk out of the sitting room into the bedroom and close the door behind her.
She wasn’t conscious of any processes of thought by which she had reached a decision. She was conscious only that the decision was there, full-blown, ready to be put into action.
When Bill came in a little later, she had finished her packing, and at the dressing table she was settling her small, pert hat at an angle above a face that was white and set.
“Where the dickens are you going?” demanded Bill sharply.
She leaned closer to the mirror to smooth her lipstick with the tip of her finger, and looked at him through the mirror.
“Back to Cypressville, for the rest of my leave,” she told him clearly, her voice quite steady.
“Oh, but look here, Cathy—if only you’d told me the truth at the beginning. You had no right to marry me without telling me about this fellow Graham.”
“There was nothing to tell, except that through circumstances over which neither of us had any control—” she began, and saw the look in his eyes and broke off with a little weary gesture. “You’re bitterly, insanely jealous, Bill—”
“I don’t deny it. Why should I?” he cut in sharply.
“You shouldn’t—I’d rather know it,” she said quietly. “But I couldn’t possibly be happy with a man who had so little faith in me, who believed in me so little that he could insult me by being jealous. That’s not love, Bill.”