Confused, Rae said a brusque goodbye and went up to her flat.
Inside, she thought back over all the times she and Ruth had chatted with Joe at Gill’s. Could he have been coming to see her, not Ruth?
After her disastrous marriage to Raymond, Rae had done her best to avoid men. But Joe had slipped in under the net, and she had grown to like him as a friend.
The next time he saw her, Joe asked her out again. Rae had no intention of allowing another man close enough to hurt her, but she didn’t see any harm in dating him – she would just be sure to keep him at arm’s length.
Being with Joe felt easy and natural, but Rae was careful not to give him the false impression that she was after anything serious. ‘If he tries to tell me he loves me, I’ll drop him,’ she told Jenny and Ruth.
One Saturday night, Rae and Joe caught a movie together and then went out on the town. By the time he walked her back to her front door it was two in the morning. ‘Can I see you again tomorrow night?’ he asked. ‘How about I call for you at eight?’
‘Okay,’ Rae shrugged. ‘See you then.’
On Sunday evening, she was ready and waiting for Joe at eight o’clock, but there was no knock on the door. Rae started pacing around the apartment, hating the feeling of waiting helplessly for a man. She kept looking out of the window, but there was no sign of him. Quarter-past and half-past went by, and still he wasn’t there.
He must have stood me up, Rae thought angrily. She should have known better than to trust another man, especially a Yank. What had she been thinking, going out with him?
There was one last possibility – perhaps Joe had gone to Gill’s by mistake, thinking they were supposed to be meeting there. She grabbed her coat and ran out into the street. She had just got to the bank on the corner when she spotted Joe walking along on the other side of the street. ‘Oi!’ she called. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
He turned around with a surprised look on his face. ‘Oh, hi, Rae,’ he said.
‘You were supposed to be at my apartment at eight o’clock!’ Rae shouted, struggling to control her anger. She had a lump in her throat, and she didn’t want to give away how hurt she felt.
‘No, that’s Monday night,’ Joe replied blankly.
‘You said last night you’d see me tomorrow,’ Rae insisted. ‘We went out on Saturday, so tomorrow means Sunday.’
‘No,’ he replied calmly. ‘I took you home at two this morning, so tomorrow night is Monday.’
Rae couldn’t believe he had come up with such a ridiculous story to cover for having stood her up. ‘Oh, get lost!’ she shouted. She turned on her heel and ran back along Walnut Street and into her apartment, slamming the door behind her.
That night, Rae barely slept, furious with herself for letting a man make her feel vulnerable again. All day on Monday in the shoe shop she wasn’t her normal chatty self. She just wanted to get home and hide away.
That evening, Rae was curled up under the covers when there was a knock on the door. Reluctantly she went downstairs and answered it.
Joe was standing on the doorstep.
‘What are you doing here?’ Rae demanded.
‘It’s eight o’clock,’ he replied. ‘We’ve got a date.’
‘That was yesterday,’ she said. ‘You didn’t turn up!’
‘No, you crazy limey,’ he replied. ‘I told you, the date was for tonight.’
Rae was thrown. Maybe it hadn’t just been an excuse, she realised.
‘So are you coming, or do I have to go on my own?’ Joe asked her.
Rae hesitated. She wanted more than anything to believe him, to know that she could trust him.
There was only one way to find out. ‘All right,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got one last chance.’ She ran and got her things, and they set off together.
‘Rae, are you sure you’re an American citizen?’ Joe asked her, as they walked up the street.
‘Yeah, why?’ she asked.
‘Because you sure as hell acted like John Bull last night!’
Joe never pressed Rae to define their relationship, but after more than a year of dating it was obvious to everyone that they were going steady – not least to his parents. ‘When are you going to marry this girl?’ his mother asked. ‘After one year, a man should know his intentions,’ his father added.
One night, Rae was cooking Joe roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner when he told her, ‘You’d make somebody a great wife, you know.’
‘Yeah, anybody but you!’ came the prickly reply.
That silenced Joe for a few more months, until parental pressure began to build up again. ‘Either marry her or drop her!’ demanded his father.
The next time Rae saw Joe, he told her, ‘My parents want to know when we’re getting married.’
‘Tell them I don’t want to get married again!’ she retorted.
Joe passed on this information to his parents, but they didn’t believe him. ‘Of course she does!’ his mother said, exasperated. For years she had been turning down approaches from the parents of Slovak girls in their neighbourhood who wanted to arrange a marriage with her son. She had been determined that Joe would marry for love, but here he was at the age of twenty-eight, with no sign of a wedding on the horizon.
The next time they were together, Joe told Rae, ‘My parents have been asking about us getting married again.’
‘Did you tell them I don’t want to?’
‘Yes, but they don’t believe me!’
Rae couldn’t help laughing at that.
‘Rae, why won’t you marry me?’ Joe asked her. It was the first time he had tackled the issue head on, and Rae suddenly found herself put on the spot.
‘Marry you? I don’t even know if you love me!’ she blurted out. She was taken aback by her own words.
‘Of course I do!’ he replied. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be asking you. But I heard you tell your friends that if I said I loved you, you’d drop me.’
Rae thought back to the comment she had made to Jenny and Ruth. Poor Joe had overheard and taken it to heart, and for nearly two years he had been unable to tell her how he felt.
Only now that he had done so did she realise she felt the same way. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you, Joe,’ she told him. To her surprise, there wasn’t a trace of doubt in her mind.
That night, Joe was finally able to give his parents the news they had long been waiting for.
‘You see?’ his mother said, triumphantly. ‘She did want to marry you all along!’
In order to marry Joe, Rae would first have to get a divorce from Raymond. She employed a lawyer, who contacted Raymond’s father in Hackett to get his address. The lawyer discovered that Raymond was living in California with his former girlfriend from West Virginia – only now she was his wife. He had married bigamously, just as Rae’s own stepfather had done all those years ago.
The last thing Rae wanted was to dredge up the painful memories of Raymond’s adultery, so she sued him for ‘indignities to the person’ rather than going into specifics. He signed the divorce papers willingly, and the error of judgement she had made as a naive nineteen-year-old was finally erased from her life.
Rae was going into this marriage as a very different woman. She may have opened her heart again, but she was determined to maintain her independence. She let Joe pay for the engagement ring she had picked out at a jewellery store on Fifth Avenue, but she bought their matching platinum wedding bands herself.
Since Rae’s first wedding had taken place in a Methodist church, the Slovak National Catholic Church didn’t recognise it, and to her new mother-in-law’s delight she and Joe were allowed to get married at the altar. This time, no one gave the bride away – she and Joe walked down the aisle together.
The reception was held at a local club, where they had planned a simple gathering. But Rae hadn’t counted on Joe’s mother and aunties, who had gone down to the club earlier and been busy cooking chicken noodle soup, stuffed cabbage, pyrih pi
es, haluski dumplings, turkey schnitzel and delicious layered torts filled with apricots and pineapple. It was a beautiful spread, a million miles away from Rae’s fish-and-chip wedding in Mansfield.
The room was packed with people, and although her own family couldn’t be with her, Rae’s friends from McKeesport, Monongahela and Hackett had all come to celebrate. The Slovaks knew how to throw a good party, and it was well into the early hours by the time people started to head home.
On their wedding night, Rae and Joe went back together to her apartment. She had decided it was where they would live now that they were husband and wife. It was still her place, but she didn’t mind sharing it with Joe.
He might be a Yank, but he was a good one.
31
Gwendolyn
Since the incident on the escalator in San Francisco, Lyn’s pangs of homesickness had grown into a burning need to return to England. Although she and Ben could scarcely afford the plane ticket, he agreed to borrow some money for her and John to go, aware of how important it was to her. Soon they were booked on a Trans World flight from San Francisco to London.
Ben dropped them off at the airport and kissed them both goodbye. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ he asked, looking anxiously at the braces on Lyn’s legs.
‘I’ll manage,’ she said, but inside she was terrified. She had never been in an aeroplane before, and she couldn’t help thinking about the hundreds of miles of ocean that they would be flying over. The old Lyn would have seen it as a big adventure, but she was more anxious now.
The flight was long, with stopovers in Newfoundland and Ireland, but when she finally stepped onto English soil again, Lyn felt overwhelmed with relief. ‘We’re home!’ she told little John, who looked at her confused. This wasn’t home to him – just a place he didn’t recognise.
Mr and Mrs Rowe were waiting at Arrivals. As soon as they saw her, Lyn’s mother cried, ‘There’s my Gwen!’
People stared at the overwrought woman with tears running down her face, but she didn’t care. She rushed over and threw her arms around her daughter.
Lyn had remembered her family as being reserved, but after so many years apart their natural restraint went out of the window.
‘Now, don’t you use that “Lyn” word in front of me!’ joked her mother, wiping away her tears. Lyn was worried about how she would respond to the sight of her in leg braces, after the comment in her letter about how ugly they were, but to her relief she didn’t mention them.
‘John, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa Rowe,’ Lyn told him.
‘Hi,’ said John shyly. His grandfather put him on his shoulders, and the family headed back to Southampton.
Over the months that she had been planning the trip, Lyn had imagined the house in Padwell Road time and time again – her childhood bedroom with its fireplace, lit every night, the grand front room that no one was ever allowed to use, and the big kitchen table that they all sat around, chatting.
‘Here we are, Gwen – home again!’ said her mother, as she ushered Lyn through the door. But Lyn was speechless. The house seemed to have shrunk significantly. The hallway was narrow and the little staircase pokey and strange, and now that she was allowed to sit in it, the front room looked cramped and sparsely furnished.
That night, Lyn slept in her childhood bedroom, but instead of feeling she was truly home, she felt like Goldilocks in someone else’s bed.
The next day, Mr Rowe took John so Lyn could have a wander around Southampton. The city had healed from the wounds of the Blitz, but so many new buildings had sprung up that the character of the town was very different. Lyn found it difficult to remember her way around now that so many old landmarks had gone, but she found her way to the Polygon Hotel, where Ben had been billeted in the war.
On a wall of the hotel a plaque had been erected to commemorate the Americans’ arrival in Britain. The sight of it brought tears to Lyn’s eyes. She thought of Eugene sitting in his jeep outside her front door, and the other brave young men she had chatted to on D-Day before they went off to risk their lives on the far shore. The GIs had passed into history, she realised. Did anyone really remember them now, when the only sign that they had ever been here was a plaque on a wall?
Standing outside the Polygon brought memories flooding back – of Ben and Lyn’s early courtship, of the elegant dances in the ballroom, when Lyn had felt so beautiful twirling around the room. She wouldn’t be able to dance like that now, she thought, looking down at the braces on her legs.
For months Lyn had felt desperate to return home to England, but now she realised that the thing she had been looking for no longer existed. It was her younger self – that confident, carefree girl who hadn’t had any knocks in life, who could stand on her own two feet without braces to support her.
On her way back to her parents’ house, Lyn sat on the bench where Ben had proposed all those years ago. She remembered the absolute trust she had felt in him then, a trust which had never faltered. As much as she loved seeing her parents, Lyn realised that Ben and John were her family now, and her home was in California with them. Whatever life in America had to throw at her, she would have to face it.
When the day came to leave, saying goodbye to her parents was even harder than when she had gone the first time. On the plane home, Lyn cried non-stop.
Back in the States, it wasn’t long before Lyn was finally able to get rid of the clunky braces and walk unaided once again. Her family and friends congratulated her on her achievement: she had finally beaten polio, and could return to a completely normal life.
One afternoon, Lyn was driving home from a friend’s house, with her son John asleep on the back seat. It was a peaceful early summer’s day with little traffic on the road, and she drove slowly, taking in the sight of flowers in bloom and the perfect blue of the California sky.
Suddenly, she was gripped by the overwhelming conviction that she was about to die. The thought hit her like a punch in the gut and she struggled to breathe, her fingers tightening around the steering wheel.
Terrified, Lyn checked the rear-view mirror to see if John had noticed. But the boy was still sleeping soundly, unaware of the crisis his mother was enduring. Outside the car, the lazy midday traffic cruised by and the birds were singing. But inside Lyn felt pure fear flooding every inch of her body. All she knew was that she had to get home, to the one place she felt safe. She put her foot down on the accelerator and sped back to the apartment.
Once she was inside with the door shut, Lyn’s breathing gradually returned to normal and the feeling of blind terror started to dissipate. She told John to play with his toys, and went to lie down.
She wondered what on earth had just happened. Where had that certainty of impending death come from? And why now, when she was finally over the polio?
That evening, Lyn did her best to forget about the horrible episode. It made no sense to her, so there was no point in dwelling on it. Perhaps she had just spent too much time in the sun.
But a few days later, Lyn was out shopping in the supermarket when once again she was suddenly gripped by fear. She leaned her hand against a wall to steady herself, her breathing becoming tighter and her heart racing. As women pushed their shopping trolleys past her, oblivious to her suffering, Lyn tried her best to regain control of herself. Once again, there was one thought paramount in her mind: she had to get home. She couldn’t cope out here on her own for one moment longer.
Back at the house, the feeling quickly subsided. But this time Lyn knew that it would come back again.
Over the following weeks and months Lyn began to dread leaving the house. She never knew when the panic attacks would strike, and there was no way of protecting herself from them. Even the most familiar places provided no guarantee of safety.
Inevitably, she began to find excuses to stay at home. When she and Ben were invited out by friends and family, she would plead a sore throat or headache. Ben did his best to support her, and if there were tasks to be
done outside the house, he offered to take them off her plate. Having stood by unable to help as she went through polio, he was anxious to protect her now. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ he told her, and as time went on, Lyn became increasingly withdrawn.
To begin with Lyn’s excuses seemed plausible, but it didn’t take long for the Patrinos to suspect something was wrong. Soon Ben’s mother was demanding to know why Lyn was no longer attending family dinners, and Ben was having to brush off her questions.
One day, Ben’s older brother Leo called and asked to speak to Lyn. She took the phone cautiously, afraid of receiving an earful for deserting the family. Leo had never shown her much kindness.
‘Lyn, I need to talk to you,’ he said.
‘Yes?’ she replied, bracing herself.
‘Are you feeling afraid right now?’
Lyn was taken aback. ‘No.’
‘I think you are, and I want to tell you something. I’ve been there – I know exactly what it’s like.’
Leo told her that the reason he had never been drafted during the war was that he had suffered from panic attacks. ‘It was a kind of nervous breakdown,’ he explained.
Lyn was shocked that he would admit such a thing to her, and for a moment she didn’t know what to say. ‘How did you get over it?’ she asked eventually.
‘I went to a shrink,’ Leo told her, ‘and he helped me out of it. I think maybe you should do the same. I promise I won’t tell the family.’
‘Thanks,’ Lyn replied. Part of her felt relieved that there was someone who understood what she was going through, but another part felt exposed, knowing he had seen through her excuses.
Back in England, the idea of seeing a psychotherapist would have been unthinkable, but here it was different. And Lyn knew Leo was right – she couldn’t go on the way she was. She needed help.
The following week, she found herself sitting on a psychotherapist’s couch. ‘I can’t understand why all of a sudden this has happened,’ she told him. ‘I used to be so independent and strong.’
GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love Page 29